Topic: [FIL]ANN [MCO] MONACO #1 Cryptocurrency Payments Card (Moderating) (Read 526 times)

Thanks for the questions, appreciated!

=====> "Myself and our development team are on top of the technology, the market and our potential customer base. But none of us have a bitcointalk account or are familiar with how crypto ICO's are traditionally conducted..."

Well, one of users Kostya put it very nicely on Monaco Slack channel:

Pinned by kostya
kostya [6:03 PM]
Tokencard: Crypto people learning how to do fintech
Monaco: Fintech people learning how to do crypto
My money is on the second.



======> The impression I got from the TKN Q&A is that they would only offer full KYC options. Will Monaco be able to offer unverified debit card options? Thanks.
Edit: Oh and TKN said they would not be able to service the US or Indian market initially. Will the Monaco card have the same initial restrictions?  

We are going to do KYC on 100% of our customers. We are building a real alternative to banks and the focus from business standpoint is on customers who already have a bank account. We are not going to be present in US & India in the beginning, but our vision is to make Monaco a global brand. It will require time, effort and capital, as in many cases it means setting up local operations, getting local e-money licenses and finding additional Visa or MasterCard issuing partners.

Kris

The card is just a way to get users in.. and allow the your funds to be easily accessible anywhere in the world on existing banking/visa rails. 

If you want to understand the true potential of the project, you have to focus on what our APP will be able to do.
One example:

We are integrating with a well funded startup in online lending space - they disrupted a lot of traditional bank business by having proprietary algorithms that judge credit risk based on thousands of data points. They provide instant loan decisions online. So by integrating with them, we will enable a new account top-up option: Instant Credit. You will be assigned a limit, from which you can top-up your account. You will receive a monthly statement for Instant Credit and if you repay on time, there is no interest.

This effectively turns Monaco Debit Card into a Credit Card -> you will not have to pre-fund your purchases!

We have similar things on the roadmap for:
- travel insurance
- wealth management / investment funds

Eventually, by integrating a lot of disruptive products into the app, we will become a platform that banks will have extremely hard time competing with.

Last, but not least - blockchain & crypto are such powerful building blocks for innovation. We could not be more excited about the potential to disrupt finance industry with it.... But coming from traditional business world / finance background, we understand that in order to take marketshare from them, we need to play by the rules. Compliance. Compliance. Compliance.

Kris

ROADMAP

Aug31st is going to be a limited qty launch - we will ship the cards to contributors and open a waiting list to general public, issuing few hundred cards per day max.
The MVP app functionality is: top-up, exchange, p2p send (free real-time sending between Monaco users), withdraw
Following versions will include: cross-border transfers, budgeting, instant loans, travel insurance
It's hard to talk about timelines, but 4 months is an eternity. We run weekly sprints and will have an R&D centre in Shenzhen with 20, maybe 30 engineers. We can do a lot in a month, let alone a quarter.

Roadmap will naturally evolve, especially we are planning to have regular feedback gathering sessions with the community.

POST ICO PERFORMANCE

We will have a dedicate team to keep the community up-to-date after the Token Sale is over. We'll get exchanges onboard to align the dates with the closing of the event.
We have a firm believe that the performance post ICO depends on 3 things:
- delivering the product into the users hands in schedule
- over-communicating with the supporters, including interim milestones that get us to launch
- growing the user based and transaction volume rapidly post-launch, to maximise the 1% contributions to the Asset Contract (which in turn will drive performance of MCO price)

We are committed to deliver on all 3 fronts.

Regarding capital, yes, if we raise substantially less, they can have an early advantage. But the reality is that we have already raised 3x more than we need to launch the product. And once it's live, we have higher token reserves to raise again at better prices and turn the capital advantage to our side. TKN mismanagement of their post ICO performance will be extremely costly to them, which they don't understand yet, because they think US$20m is all the money they will ever need. Shows lack of scaling experience.

Last, but not least, as a serial company builder, my core skill sets are:
- assembling a world class team and lining them up behind a singular vision
- pushing them to achieve things they thought not possible
- acquiring & retaining customers at a fraction of cost

That last piece is what investors should always look for in founders. Anybody can burn through capital to build user base. Can you do it without money? I bootstrapped my e-commerce startup in HK without venture capital to almost 1,000,000 users by the time it was sold for $21m. That's like 20% of online population in HK.. Mass market adoption.

We're taking all these learnings and using it to make Monaco better and deliver a fantastic product for the community.

Support us & have your friends support us, too!

Kris