SureRemit recently held an AMA on r/Stellar subreddit which was attended by our founder Samuel Biyi and Global Venture Developer Selwyn Paehlig. They answered various questions about the project, product development and all the future developments that are happening in the SureRemit ecosystem.

Here is a transcript of the concluded AMA:

Dogstar35: When will the process of in App purchases and redemptions be fully automated and therefore be more decentralised? It must be a priority to have the back end integration with Busha finished as it will free up a lot of developer time as well. When can we expect this to happen pls?

SamuelRemit: App purchases are solidly increasing and the ability to fulfill RMT orders directly on the market will definitely have a positive impact. It's a major priority for us. The good news is that it's technically possible and as we recently assessed, with or without Busha. I'm unable to put an exact deadline on it, we’re aiming for end June or July. It's at the very top of the development pipeline.

hashedbin: Good luck with the expansion in what looks like the start of better market conditions.

My questions:

Do you plan to add XLM and BNB as an additional in-app payment method for vouchers? ( That’s assuming your system can convert the value to RMT market orders on SDEX of course) What do you think about donating a small percentage of sales to charity through the Binance Charity Foundation? Will I be able to look up an in-app purchase on Stellar Expert? What are your plans for marketing SureRemit to the non-crypto retail consumer? Do you plan to grow organically, or will you need to raise more capital?

Thanks

SamuelRemit: Thank you!

1. We recently had that discussion internally and figured that if we can jump through hoops to accept USD, what's stopping us from accepting BTC, BNB and especially XLM as well? The technical guys confirmed that it's no problem at all, so it's now being implemented. Looking to add BTC, ETH, LTC, XLM and BNB to buy RMT in-app.

2. We've not considered donating to the Binance Charity Foundation. We'll very much like to, as part of a holistic partnership with Binance, which we've been trying to facilitate. Hopefully, they'll realize the power of our community and the value of our asset through all our developments. Nonetheless, we do have relationships with other charities like the RemitFund and we're looking to deepen them.

3. Once we're able to settle app purchase transactions directly on the market, it's very easy to look them up on Stellar Expert.

4. From our recent marketing efforts, although mostly targeted at the crypto crowd, we've had some decent app download activity from traditional users. We're learning a lot from their user experience and our customer service is getting a lot of insight into their expectations from such an app. They've been quite busy. Eventually, they are our real market, and when we're ready to serve them right, we'll recalibrate our marketing efforts to target local audiences and the broader remittance market.

5. It will be difficult to grow at the speed demanded by our community organically. Already, our pace has slowed as a consequence of the crypto market conditions, which affected us as well. We're growing and developing regardless, and now that we have increased traction, we're in the market for a traditional capital raise. The crypto market is also turning for the better and the better it gets, the better our financial position as well. So we'll do more and better than organic growth.

kede11: Why not open all the countries in one day or several days. Is it not a waste of time to open one every day? 2. Is there any plan for the number of users to develop quickly? Is there an incentive plan for 50,000 users with 100,000 users and 1 million users? 3. Is there a plan around the user's addition, retention, activity, and dissemination? Some users must have activeness and can leave users.

SelwynSR: We decided on this marketing approach. Also, we're currently integrating more countries as we speak.

The SureRemit platform has many use cases, the core use case is solving cross border non-cash remittances. But that's not all, as our partnership with StreetLib shows: they use SureRemit to pay royalties globally to their authors. Another example as mentioned in another post is Corporate Rewarding. Also, crypto holders can use SureRemit to purchase vouchers to buy goods and services. We take the quick wins where we can to increase app usage, at the same time we will intensify marketing locally to create awareness for our services. The upcoming Country Ambassador program is an example of that.

lexled: Many companies utilize gift cards to reward employees. My company has started using SureRemit to reward employees with e-vouchers of their choice. It works very well when i send an employee a list of available vendors and they choose the vendor. I then send them the gift card instantly, they love it. Is there and marketing aspect that will target the commercial use of SureRemit? A short commercial depicting the process I described above would be a great tool for attracting commercial use of the app.

SelwynSR: Corporate Rewards programs are SureGift's core business, many international corporations are our clients. This is also a use case for SureRemit as corporates around the world can now access voucher markets for their employees locally and globally through SureRemit's platform. A use case that we will create awareness for indeed, we'll discuss and decide on the most suitable approach.

chershyan:

What is the strategy for Sureremit to get merchants globally in various countries to sign up and for this list to continue growing? How competitive are sureremit currency exchange rates? When compared against other competitors with similar offering. Will there be a means for direct transfers from bank-to-app and vice-versa? It’s noted competitor offerings such as Crypterium have this in place.

SamuelRemit:

1. So far, we've been most successful in our merchant expansion efforts. We've brokered a lot of partnerships and our pipeline of merchants is rich. Expansion efforts always continue, it’s an ongoing process; more B2B partners and directly with merchants. We think our users will be happy with the rate of our merchant network expansion in the short term.

2. If we can say so ourselves, SureRemit is perhaps one of the most competitive out there in terms of utility. In fact, compared to other assets in our industry, the utility of RMT suggests that it's undervalued, and it's only a matter of time before it finds its place.

3. Any interaction with the banking system comes with its suite of headaches. In the crypto space, the ideal is always to avoid running on the banking rails. Crypterium value proposition looks like it's to enable an interface with the banking system, so I imagine that their investments and infrastructure is mostly towards dealing with those systems and all the complications that come with them (bank accounts, POS, ATM etc.). Our approach has been about how we can bypass those systems. If it's something we can do without further burden to our users, perhaps by partnering with fellow crypto companies like Crypterium, we could explore it. We'll look into this.

lexled: Will SureGifts and SureBids be integrated all into the SureRemit app? If yes, what is the timeline?

SamuelRemit: Integrating SureGifts transactions have proven a bit more difficult than we originally imagined because of the dependencies required. Specifically, since we receive NGN (fiat) for most of the transactions there, we'll need a fiat exchange to make an RMT middle-layer work, and that's one of the areas where we need guys like Busha. They work on an independent development timeline, and it's not at the very top of the list for them, but it's there.

amicrypto: Few points that I want to be discussed:

Do you plan to integrate donation portals on the app? I think it would complement your overall strategy about being able to allow cross border value transfer in a cheap and easy way. Are there any plans about allowing BTC, ETH and other prominent cryptocurrency deposits in the app and allow automatic swaping with RMT in the backend (via Busha)? If yes, when do we see that getting implemented?

SamuelRemit:

You are very right. We had to prioritize in building our fundamentals, the result was that we had to allocate time and resources to other segments of our development. Happy to say that once the dust has settled on the current SureRemit goes Global! campaign, we’ll have more time to get charity donations up and running. Please see answer to Hashedbin above.

thisisdarshan: Which other countries are you targeting with current SureRemit goes Global! campaign? When are you targeting to launch in each of these countries?

SelwynSR: We'll announce a new country daily (weekdays), hope you don't mind if we keep the upcoming countries as a surprise...During the SureRemit goes Global! campaign we continue the integration of more countries. Looks like we should be able to run the campaign for approx. 2 more weeks, depending on integration progress.

lexled: The SDEX is a good place for a new token to start, however, it seems as if its the same handful of traders playing off each other. In order to receive a true market value, the token needs to be listed on exchanges with good volume. I have seen that SureRemit has applied to several big exchanges and has listed on the roadmap to join one exchange, at least, every quarter. Applying is great, but getting accepted and listed is the goal. Is their a plan in place to push these exchange applications and an overall goal of the number of exchange listings needed to achieve true market value?

SamuelRemit: You're right. We've matured enough to the point where the SDEX might be inadequate to serve our token holders. So far, we've been approaching the exchange listings processes as formally required. While we've not made tangible progress with a lot, we are now in active conversations with a few and hope we can get listed as soon as possible. We believe that if we continue on our current trajectory, a lot of exchanges will find RMT difficult to ignore, so a ramp-up of our development, marketing and user activity will also favor our exchange listing goals more than anything else. In the end, as businesses themselves, exchanges are only eager to list tokens they believe a lot of people are eager to trade.