Stellar.org, a nonprofit organization that supports an open and universal financial protocol, and Coins.ph, a Southeast Asia mobile financial services provider for the underbanked, has announced a partnership that will allow global remittances to anyone in the Philippines through the use of both Coins.ph and Stellar wallet. At launch, sending money to a Coins.ph wallet in the Philippines will be free.
Moreover, Stellar has announced partnerships with three more financial institutions that will help with low-cost global money transfers to India, Europe and cross-border M-PESA payments to and from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria. The institutions are Flutterwave, ICICI Bank, and Tempo Money Transfer.
“Coins.ph, ICICI, Flutterwave and Tempo are leading the charge to make blockchain real and bringing the benefits of the software to market” said Jed McCaleb, CTO of Stellar.org. “While they made the decision to integrate with Stellar because of efficiency and cost, these partnerships bring us closer to our goal of making money move as easily as email” said McCaleb. “This is the start of achieving our mission of enabling a worldwide financial network that anyone can use.”
A key advantage of the Stellar network is that with a single integration, financial institutions immediately gain access to all the other institutions on the Stellar network. For example, all the financial institutions on the Stellar network will be able to send money seamlessly to the Philippines through Coins.ph, to India through ICICI, and from Europe through Tempo.
“Connecting Coins.ph to the Stellar remittance network will allow more Filipinos abroad to have fast, low-cost access to remitting funds back home, something we are obviously very excited about.” said Ron Hose, co-founder and CEO of Coins.ph