Phillippine Pawnshop Bank on Crypto Remittance Amind COVID-19 Crisis

A Bitcoin-remittance called Rebit is a service that helps you send money from any part of the world to the individual in the Philippines using Bitcoin. Rebit was founded in 2014 by Satoshi Citadel Industries (SCI), the company which was co-founded by Miguel. After the foundation of Rebbit in Phillippine, the company opened several centers cash pick up centers in the country. In the recent past, Rebbit partnered with more 10,000 payout locations across the nation. The citizens started believing in the easy way to grab the cash and send it to the authorized person.

The idea behind developing Rebbit was 90 percent of adults in Phillippines are lack of bank account and international remittances make up 11 percent of GDP. Pawn Shops go the last mile for millions of unbanked people who require cash and need to follow the process of send and recieve money. At the pawnshop, the person can also purchase microinsurance, pay bills or borrow cash. Despite a bad reputation for dishing out predatory loans and high interest rates, an emergency loan from the pawnshop is the best way out for someone to get the debits.

However, it is also considered that pawnshop is inefficient. The reason behind this criticism is that to redeem 500PHP, a person has to wait outside the shop for hours. Then a person has to do the legal paper formalities for the verification. The process to send or receive money is way too long and takes a lot of your time to complete.

From the feedback by the people, there are several numbers of forms to be filled and every form has similar questions requesting to fill the information.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic it is very difficult to stay away from home and be in the crowd for a long time. Miguel, who is a Manila-citizen states that as we all are quarantining together it becomes extremely risky to stay outside for a long time and avoid getting infected. The lengthy process designed by Rebbit need to get shortened and should release people with a minimum operational process without compromising the quality of verification. They need to come up with some plans and strategies that reduce the operational process.

Miguel dropped an opinion to go digital as it benefits greater connectivity, enhancement in productivity, and reduced costs. As the world has become digital and more specifically banking and Bitcoin has been full-fledged digital platforms, this has to be developed very soon.