NairaEx - a Nigeria-based Bitcoin exchange is about to make history with the launch of bitcoin remittance service that will allow Nigerians to send and receive money with zero fees and great exchange rates.
Sending or Receiving Money with NairaEx is straightforward, the sender deposit money into the NairaEx platform, provide us with beneficiary bank details and NairaEx will pay into the beneficiary’s local bank account.
We currently enable payment to China, India, Mexico, Europe. It takes 2 to 24 hours for the beneficiary to receive the money in their bank account. There are no hidden fees or charges.
You can use this service to pay suppliers, school fees, living expense, salary etc
“Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate”
Please, I’m not an expert. I’m far from being one sef. I wanted to experiment with purchasing a few coins and mining back in 2010 and now I almost regret not doing so. Who am I kidding? I’d have made some interesting money selling them last year.
Customers using this service doesn’t need to have bitcoin in order for them to send or receive. They don’t even need to know about bitcoin, that’s why I said we are making history. Bitcoin is just an underlying element for the fund transfer instead of relying on banking infrastructure.
NAIRA (Nigeria) ----> BITCOIN ----> CNY (china)
About the article, your bitcoin transaction will have a higher priority confirmation on the blockchain if you pay higher transactions fees currently about $0.12 per transaction. If you don’t want to wait, pay more fees.
Lol, I’m definitely no expert. But surely you’ve read Brian’s post? And surely you’re concerned? Or in your opinion the implication is just this increase of $0.12?
In any case, it’s clear you’ve chose your platform so maybe you can only ride it out with the rest. Good luck with that.
So moving on to your nairex.com/transfer which you’ve just launched. It looks straightforward but:
Your step 2 ‘Book Foreign Exchange Rate’ could be made better. It might be easier to provide the rates right at that point on a daily basis. If that’s too much engineering to provide at this point, at least link the ‘Email’ and ‘Call’ to respective details so they become CTA.
Your headers of the 4 steps should really be in another font or at the least, made bold. Currently hard to read and visually confusing.
Appears you’ve not implemented your currency converter. This is key information for anyone thinking of using your service. To answer that question ‘how much will I send/receive?’. So best to fix that.
If I were you, I would consider some chat tool (eg intercom.io) at this point. Just seems to me like this is your most important page and you definitely want to engage with website visitors once they’re in this section.
In all, I like your premise of transferring money by using Bitcoin as underlying currency. This can indeed do wonders for international transfers or school fees (like your copy). All boils down to execution I guess. BTW, good work on your blog as well. Seems to be a lot of effort to educate which is always a good thing.
lol, you are both frequent poster on bitcoin related topics.
I haven’t been following the hard-fork drama lately, it has little impact on NairaEx. Our customers wallet are hosted with BlockTrail. In case of network split, most service providers will switch to source code with majority hash.
We’ll see how this plays out, low fees and fast transactions are one of the advantages of bitcoin which are not guaranteed at the moment.
Thank you for taking the time to write your feedback. I will work on them before the launch.
its really annoying atimes. i bought 5k dollar to sell to a client, no confirmation for up to 12 hours. i did some investigation and found out that the bitcoin sent to me was not even confirmed yet at the sellers side.
Nice work! Some very key points that @PapaOlabode has highlighted which you should not sleep on.
Questions:
How are you guys different from bitpesa and whats your competitive advantage?
Why Blocktrail over the more established brands. Always better to go with the bigger brands when dealing with money, you don’t want said company to be slow, fail or worse poofff…
For Q1. You have a competitive advantage over the competition that I hope you point out, don’t worry if you don’t see it I will tell you.
I think we are the only startup in Africa ( maybe the whole world) that offers cash in/cash out or Fiat to Bitcoin to Fiat bitcoin remittance. Bitcoin is great for remittance but converting bitcoin from/to cash is a very daunting process which can take days and during this period your bitcoins might have lost some value.
The receiving exchange rate is based on the parallel market which better than what most money transfer operators are giving customers. The sending exchange rate is based on black market rate but in most cases it’s better than aboki or using bank ATM cards since we don’t charge any fees.
Our business model is different.
NairaEx account is based on BYOW (Bring Your Own Wallet) If you want to buy bitcoin from us, you will enter the address where you want us to send the bitcoins to. If you checked our blog, I always recommended users installing a standalone wallet that they can control. Blocktrail is a well established wallet provider popular among devs and they are backed by VC.
Good job with the company so far!. fintech advice is always free.
Your competitive advantage over bitpesa is Q1 in my previous post. At least not to my knowledge - They currently do not offer Currency to Bitcoin to Another Currency (without a bitcoin wallet!), which you guys do. I believe they don’t do this because of security issues, so for you guys to be doing this, you will have to convince people that you have security taken care off (especially when it pertains to money).
Now if you think about this for a second; the internet law of client adoption & retention states that the more complicated and or longer the steps in the client experience process the lower you adoption & retention rate.
People are skeptical about bitcoin, so to use their service (not yours), I need to first open a bitcoin wallet with xyz company, then buy/send bitpesa my bitcoins, then they convert, then forward to the final recipient.
ME $ > Bitcoin wallet in xyz company > Then convert bitcoin to new currency (naira) > send to final recipient. Now if all of these steps were in the backend that I don’t see great! but in an already complex process such as bitcoin, having a brand new user have to open a bitcoin wallet separate from them leads to thanks but no thanks.
Looks like your team has crossed that hurdle (I’m assuming you have license and all taken care off), so rethink @PapaOlabode’s points and you should be on a good track. You still have grounds to cover tho, as they have laid a good foundation in Nigeria and sometime people just feel safer with a foreign company, so some convincing will be key.
PS: I didn’t check your market exchange rate compared to theirs, if its anything but lower - well you know where people’s money will go!
@fintechng NairaEx is not new to the Nigerian market. We beta tested it’s predecessor for 1 year before I launched NairaEx and we are the first in Nigeria so we laid the foundation.
emmmm scratching head no they don’t. They do not have the ability to transfer without a client bringing his/her own bitcoin wallet (I can’t remember if it was because they don’t have a license or just a security issue).
This is an extra step in the process and will lead to a couple of clients dropping out.