Reserve, the stable cryptocurrency built for people and businesses in countries with high inflation, is pleased to give an in-depth look at one of our partners, 7Mobile Africa, the largest importer of mobile phones in Angola.

Reserve is working to pre-load its digital payment app on one-million 7Mobile devices over the next four years. And to ensure greater inclusion in the Reserve mobile-payment network, 7Mobile will pre-load the app on both smartphones and feature phones, so that Angolans who don’t own smartphones can still use the payment platform.

Discussing the partnership, 7Mobile founder and chief executive officer Alex Thomson-Payan said “Reserve will allow the developing world to transact and grow to become the developed world.”

In Angola, where the oil crisis of 2015 led the country’s domestic currency — the Kwanza — to lose roughly 75 percent of its value in a few months, and where the inflation rate reached 23 percent in 2018, Reserve offers a compelling value proposition. “Providing everyone in Angola the ability to protect their money from inflation — that alone is a desperately needed service,” said Thomson-Payan. “And with the ability to enable quick and

easy payments — both peer-to-peer and within the stores they frequent — that makes the Reserve stablecoin and app incredibly valuable to our customers.”

Born and raised in Miami, Thomson-Payan is the grandnephew of former Colombian President Alfonso Lopez. He has been living and working in Angola since 2007, when he founded Electrix Telecom with $200,000 raised from Swiss and American investors. With no landline infrastructure, Angola presented the perfect market for Thomson-Payan to launch a mobile

telecommunications venture. By 2014, Thomson-Payan’s company was earning $2 million in monthly revenue selling cellphones to the Angolan people.

At the World Economic Forum panel in Davos last January, Thomson-Payan highlighted the utility of Reserve’s stablecoin solution in an anecdote, where he discussed how the 2015 oil-crisis decimated 7Mobile’s corporate treasury.

At the time, the company had $20 million worth of Kwanza in an Angolan bank account. But after the oil route, the value of 7Mobile deposits dwindled to $4 million, leaving the company with more debt than cash. “Within three months we were underwater,” said Thomson-Payan. But if a stable cryptocurrency would have been available at the time, Thomson-Payan said the difference would have been “night and day.” “It’s not only the utility of it, it’s also the facility of it. The fact that I can literally, the same minute, transfer anywhere in the world any amount of money — that’s huge.”

In Thomson-Payan, Reserve has found a staunch ally, who believes in the company’s vision to create a decentralized mobile-money network that will scale prosperity throughout Angola and the developing world.

To learn more about Reserve and its go-to-market strategy with 7Mobile in Angola, please join the conversation on Telegram.