Joining me now is Mohammad Raafi Hossain, CEO and Co-Founder of Fasset. Welcome to the show.
You call it any-to-any banking — any person, any asset, any currency, anywhere. What does that actually solve for someone in a frontier market that a normal bank app does not?
The goal is this: if you are someone who has earned their money lawfully with your blood, sweat, and tears, you should have the fundamental human right to receive your money without paying anybody — it should be free. You should be able to send your money to whomever you want, as fast and as low cost as possible. And our vision goes even further — any person should be able to move their funds to any person, but it could be anything. Today we have customers who earn their salary, get it in tokenised gold, and send tokenised gold back to their family back home. Any person to any person, any asset to any asset, any currency to any currency. That should be a fundamental right for everybody.
Fasset just raised $68 million and reached unicorn status. Does that speed change how fast you can reach underserved markets, or is capital never been the bottleneck?
Capital, without a doubt, is definitely a bottleneck. Companies building in America for America have a huge economy, a lot of people they can sell to, and one set of regulations. In our part of the world, you have many different countries, each with a set of licenses, different regulation, different currency. One person in Dubai might be sending money to three or four different countries. For a company like ours to build enough infrastructure to resonate with enough people, it takes capital. But this capital is very special to us. What sets us apart from other financial institutions is that we have one higher priority than just making revenue — we genuinely want to make it easier and healthier for people to bank.
SBI network covers close to 200 countries. Is partnering with giants like that the only realistic way to reach frontier markets?
There are two ways to look at SBI. They share similar values to us. But despite their gargantuan size, they are also not in the markets that we are in. Even the largest banks are starting to understand that without stablecoins, without blockchain, it is very difficult to penetrate into frontier markets. They see us as being on the ground and close to the customer. What we see in SBI is that they have deep financial infrastructure in Japan. It is a meeting of two companies that share similar values, each bringing something the other does not have.
Which market taught you the most about what access actually means on the ground?
The problems are most acute in capital controlled markets — Pakistan and Bangladesh are two good examples. You could be from the best university, you could have studied abroad, but when you earn from abroad and are living in these countries, the moment you earn $10,000 a month, it is converted into local currency. You might hold $15,000, but over the course of the year that $15,000 in local currency becomes $8,000. That is not fair. The irony is that someone in Pakistan can buy an Apple MacBook, they can buy an iPhone, but they cannot invest in Apple because that means sending money out of the country. They can send money out to buy a product — but they cannot send money out to invest. That is not fair.
Do people in the markets you serve actually trust stablecoins?
Right now, today, stablecoins are settled in our markets more than Visa and Mastercard combined. People do not have a choice — they cannot interact directly with the dollar. The next best solution, and in some cases an even better solution, is stablecoins. So it is widely prevalent. But what we are bringing is an easy-to-use platform to use those stablecoins, and also to promote that all of our customers should be owners of assets. In this era of inflation, if you are not investing in something healthy, your net worth is fading away. And if you take debt, there is really no chance to survive.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Appreciate it. Thank you very much.
