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FINTECH FRIDAY$ Podcast (EP.1-Jul 20): with Samir Bandali of CoinPayments
NCFA Canada | Craig Asano | July 20, 2018
Fintech Fridays Podcast ep1-Jul 20: Interview with Samir Bandali of CoinPayments
Host: Manseeb Khan, NCFA
Guest: Samir Bandali, Director of Strategic Partnerships, CoinPayments
To kickoff the first episode of our Fintech Fridays weekly podcast, our host Manseeb Khan is joined by Samir Bandli, Director of Strategic Partnerships of CoinPayments, to talk about the future of crypto from its role today and its role in the future. CoinPayments offers merchants an option to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment and currently works with over 700+ altcoins.
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Transcription of Interview
NCFA: Hey everyone Manseeb Khan and you are tuning into the NCFA Canada's newest podcast series called Fintech Fridays where we sit down with the incredible people in the Fin-tech community and talk about leading fintech products innovations developments and challenges. Today I'm here with Samir Bandali from CoinPayments. Samir thanks so much for being here.
CoinPayments: Thanks for having me Manseeb, I'm very excited share what we do in the world.
NCFA: Yeah before I even started I did a lot of research. Can you tell us what CoinPayments is about? The problem is trying to solve, and I guess the achievements it’s trying to make?
CoinPayments: Sure thing. CoinPayments primarily a multi-currency online wallet allowing users to store and transact with crypto currencies and allowing merchants to accept those crypto currencies for goods services CoinPayments was established in about 2013. As the first alt coin payment processor in the world is in a time when most cryptocurrency companies were focused primarily on bitcoin and our founder and CEO Alex came up with this idea to create a company that's focused on all of the tokens that were available to the market. So CoinPayments solved the problem of utility tokens not having a real-world use case. And over the past five years we've grown into one of the largest. Cryptocurrency payment processors. In the whole world. Today we support over. 535. Different digital currencies. Aligned merchants and users to store hold and use these currencies in one stop. One log international online. At this time, we have one point five million vendors worldwide. We're really starting to see that cryptocurrency is making that next move. Into a mainstream merchant adoption. And real-world utility cases. CoinPayments prides ourselves on being a coin agnostic system. Where we really focus on being.
A support platform for the entire cryptocurrency industry. Yeah 2017 was a huge year for us. We. Experienced exponential growth. Process almost 1 billion dollars in transactions a crypto currency. Things are just picking up. We created a plug in for Shopify recently. Fellow Canadian company there and we also have other plugins. WOOCommerce, OS commerce, Magento. Basically, every major e-commerce platform. In the world.
NCFA: Okay. Damn that's incredible. I'm glad you guys are providing an amazing service, so my next question would be why should merchants consider offering a Crypto payment solution?
CoinPayments: So, I think the big thing to remember here is cryptocurrency is still in the very early infancy stages. Even though bitcoin started out in 2011 we're still innovating technology every day and finding a way to maximize efficiency and really allow people to transact an international scale. So, I think what merchants have to realize when you select crypto currency as a payment option you're tapping into this entirely new market of people all around the world that are holding these coins and basically gaining this value off of this massive increase in markets and don't know what to do with or how to spend it. So if you're running a business and let's say you're making a million dollars in a year of sales realistically if you add cryptos to that maybe one or two percent well we'll start out in crypto so a majority of your business your operations will still be run with traditional fiat currency but you're just giving your users an additional option and tapping into new market so it's really just extra money and a little bit of fun because it gives you the option to speculate maybe hold on to some crypto and learn about where the future of fintech is going and inevitably one day this is going to be worth a lot more market share.
NCFA: So how many wallets do you guys currently connect to?
CoinPayments: So, as I mentioned before CoinPayments currently supports our 535 different currencies. Now a lot of those currencies are just a wallet solution for somewhere to store and for users to be able to send and receive with other like peer to peer. Our merchant API connects to just about a hundred of those currencies. So those wallets basically enable merchants to accept any of the 100 currencies support with the API. And additionally, we have a really cool feature called Pay by name. And what that does is it allows a store or a person to set up a quick nickname we call it a cash tags sign let's say Samir for myself. That immediately opens up the gateway to access all the currencies that are available in a shopping cart. So rather than providing a defense hash or wallet ID all you have to do is a dollar sign and CFA and someone can send you any of the currencies that we close for them.
NCFA: Damn, I love the sound of that and that's awesome. So, what would be the hottest crypto currencies that you are currently seeing and like the type of volumes that you're seeing.
CoinPayments: So I mean we were in a highly volatile market here so there's a flavor of the month… every day sometimes you know me recently we're part of the integration between Verge and Pornhub which were his largest porn site in the world to accept our Verge currency which is a privacy coin. We've been trying to build relationships with different communities and very close with the decred community Token pay a couple couple coins that are focusing on merchant adoption but I think we're still in a BTC dominated world in my opinion the hottest cryptocurrency will always be bitcoin because it's the only one with the true liquidity at this point I guess. And and I'd say 60 to 70 percent of our overall volume still comes in bitcoin even though we focus on all these markets so instead of us.
So how do you see Coinpayments play a role into like things like cannabis right because cannabis is just starting to get legal in Canada. It's been getting legal in a couple of states. There's definitely a being online merchants for cannabis like hemp products and all that so I guess how do you see crypto playing a role in that? So that one's actually a little bit tricky. The reason being both cannabis and cryptocurrency are very new emerging markets as far as regulatory jurisdiction. And really how authorities are going to be looking at the legalities and how it all fits in and cannabis has been obviously illegal for a long time and even that I think yesterday the government passed that bill making it legal but it's still very much a gray area. A lot of people it's it's kind of like a stigma around it. The crypocurrency is very much the same way basically your regulatory authorities haven't found a clear path as to how they want to treat cryptocurrency whether it's a currency or commodity security whatever you want to call it. So, I mean the big thing with cannabis becoming legal is tax right? and government is going to make access of this a big problem with cops right now as direction as to how taxes and cryptocurrency relate. So, I think it's probably going to be a little bit of time before we really see a true marriage between cryptocurrency and cannabis although it is inevitable down the line. I think both markets need to find clear direction and a clear path to regulatory authority before we can really merge them because at this time if you're taking one gray area into another gray area and just gets a lot darker gray. Yeah yeah.
NCFA: Very, very true as we heard the CoinPayments is currently running a airdrop campaign. You talk a little bit more about that?
CoinPayments: For sure. So, as I said that we've been around for about five years now and we have 1.5 million users worldwide and a lot of merchants who've been with us from the start and stop with us over the times as we develop all these new exciting features like pay by name and a few that I can't even name right now but are rolling out in the next few months here. We decided it will be a cool opportunity to give a little bit back to our customers who've been loyal to us for a long time and at the same time create some sort of incentive to be able to compete with all these new emerging companies trying to do the same thing that we're doing. So, we decided to do an airdrop to create our own basically native platform token and it will allow all of our users to save 50 percent on transaction fees and conversion fees. Wow. I'm transacting with that coin as well as upcoming allocations and ICOs that are using CoinPayments as the payment gateway for the platform. So, our users will now be able to participate in these projects using the CPS coin that we're dropping the airdrop is officially happening on July 1st. So, there's still time if anybody wants to get involved. You can check out more information at W W W dot CoinPayments coin dot com or just sign up for an account add. WWW.Coinpayments.net. And. You're eligible for free tokens right off the bat. Giving 100 free coins each user. Which equates to about twelve dollars in value.
NCFA: So, I guess what are future opportunities that you guys are seeing a CoinPayments like can you give me like a rough roadmap and I guess some of the challenges ahead.
CoinPayments: I know you definitely thought of it like there's some tokens you can't talk about yet although I do have a couple of things I can release to the public so I find it kind of a natural evolution in our company to start to morph towards. Not only just a wallet provider and a payment processor but it's also kind of build out an exchange and allow users to really have a one stop shop to use crypto currency in any way that they want. So are our long-term plan here is to be able to basically create an environment that allows users to converge freely between the coins that we host on our system as much as you want on a regular exchange. And also following that would be. To allow merchants. And easy fiat. Settlements option or even users an easy fiat on-boarding. So, for CoinPayments Is to truly be that place where. You can log into the site. Deposit. Some money buy some crypto. Change or for whatever other crypto you want to use. Use that crypto in the real world to buy tangible products and services and potentially cash that back out to your bank account if you're if you're wanting to do that. So, we're really working towards becoming full service one stop shop. And I think over the next three or four months we're going to roll out some features that are going to surprise a lot of people and really make us competitive with the large players in this industry like the Coinbases. What would be your top two to three golden nuggets when it comes fintech and investors and FinTech founders that are trying to build something with in Canada.
I am a huge advocate on education right now. I believe the next big jump for crypto to really start to make a dent in FinTech is truly educating people on what's cryptocurrency as how to use cryptocurrency. Like I've been involved in this space for a few years now and I can still say that well over 90 percent of my friends don't even understand what bitcoin is or the fact that you can divide a bitcoin into 100 million pieces or you can actually buy a car or a watch or a T-shirt with that question on the Internet right now. People are still in this weird phase where you're seeing mainstream media outlets extremely uneducated sharing useless facts with people and guys like Rebel CEO being like we're going to be bigger than Bitcoin. There's all this weird fud in the market and I just think that the big thing for all of us and a responsibility we have by being in this industry is to educate people and walk them through how they can be a part of this emerging cryptocurrency phenomenon.
NCFA: Yeah now that makes sense because if we want everybody to use it helps that everybody knows how to use it and when to use and where to use right and that comes with like all working together like I think the overall market share of crypto towards money is like zero point one percent on a global scale.
CoinPayments: Now as we grow there is enough room for everyone and it's definitely going to be about working together building communities. And you see that a lot of crypto each of these different projects have very active communities. People who are involved in the early days are engaged and they want to learn, and they want to spread that learning and education everybody so in any couple of years coming up a bench.
NCFA: Yeah, I think so too because like from what I'm taking away your I guess your golden nugget would be just like make sure you not only share within the community that you've built around your company but share within the complete world still community in general right. So as long as everybody kind of knows what to expect or they get they get everyone get kind of navigate within the huge crypto ship together. Right. Definitely. Awesome. Okay cool. So, wrapping up would be the best way to contact you if anybody has any questions. Would it be through Twitter, do I WhatsApp, do I Snapchat you how I would be the best way to contact you.
CoinPayments: think that I have a couple different forms of communication with the community. But the best way I get in touch with us is either through Twitter on which our handle is @Coinpayments.net. Through my email directly. PR@coinpayments.net. I'm always open for any sort of opportunities and collaboration to find synergy with other companies that have similar interests.
NCFA: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I mean like I'm super excited, everything that company is about to do. Becoming a full service one stop shop that should be really exciting. And yeah, I can't wait to buy socks with bitcoin that would be really awesome. That's like I'm really excited for. Oh my gosh.
CoinPayments: We've had about 300 Shopify stores sign up in the last two months since we went live with that integration. And I can tell you right I thought my I'd like at least a dozen stores where you can buy stocks right now. Actually, it runs www.alwayshodl.com. Oh good He's got some real cool crypto on merchandise and allows you to buy crypto swag with the type of crypto that it's representing. So pretty good.
NCFA: That's really it that's a really cool concept. All right well Samir thanks so much for sitting down with me. This has been super enlightening, super educational and best of luck on everything. All right thanks alot man.
CoinPayments: All right thanks alot man.
End of Podcast
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada non-profit actively engaged with cryptocurrency, blockchain, crowdfunding, alternative finance, fintech, P2P, ICO, STO, and online investing stakeholders globally. NCFA Canada provides education, research, industry stewardship, services, and networking opportunities to thousands of members and subscribers and works closely with industry, government, academia, community and eco-system partners and affiliates to create a strong and vibrant crowdfunding and fintech industry. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: ncfacanada.org
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Sep 28, 2023 Fintech is an ever-evolving world where every click counts and every lead may be game-changing; therefore mastering SEO has become essential. Welcome to Fintech SEO where competing for top search engine results pages (SERPs) rankings doesn't simply translate to visibility but rather leads to sales conversion. In this article, we'll uncover its immense power, discuss why high SERP rankings lead to conversions and traverse organic traffic that fuels fintech success. SERP Rankings in Fintech Imagine this: you need financial advice or are searching for investment options, where would you go? Chances are you would consult your search engine; the websites appearing at the top of those search results have built trust among both their users and search engines alike. ➡️ High Rankings Are an Indication of Trustworthiness Achieving high rankings on SERPs for your fintech website is like earning a gold star of trustworthiness from users; they know Google or Bing have already approved and reviewed your services - often leading to them opting for them over those offered by your competitors. When you enlist the expertise of a fintech SEO agency such as Sure Oak, you're essentially enlisting professionals who specialize in elevating your trustworthiness on ...
Cyber Security | Sep 27, 2023 The cyber landscape in 2023 has witnessed a significant surge in ransomware attacks, with small businesses becoming the primary targets. According to a report from Infosecurity Magazine, ransomware attackers are increasingly targeting smaller, less defended organizations. There was a 47% increase in new victims in the latter half of 2022, with many of these being small businesses with less mature cyber postures. Specifically, 57% of the victims of the LockBit gang, known for high-profile attacks on the Royal Mail and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), were small businesses. Many of these groups are moving away from traditional encryption-based attacks. Instead, they threaten to expose and publicize sensitive information, shifting from ransomware to pure extortion tactics. See: Small Businesses Incur Greatest Loss of Cyber Attacks | 67% Suffer Repeat Attacks Within 12 Months Ransomware by the Numbers In the first half of 2023, there was a 45.27% global increase in ransomware victim organizations, totaling 2,001. During the same period, the sectors most targeted by ransomware were banking, retail, and transportation. LockBit, a dominant ransomware since 2022, primarily targeted IT, finance, and professional services. Nearly 50% of all ransomware victims were US-based organizations, a significant increase ...
Release | Sep 27, 2023 Elevate's Acquisition of CIX is A Testament to Canada's Flourishing Startup Ecosystem Canada's startup landscape has always been a vibrant tapestry of innovation, ambition, and collaboration. At the heart of this ecosystem, organizations like the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) have played pivotal roles in spotlighting the nation's most promising startups and bridging the gap between innovators and investors. As a long-time community partner and admirer of CIX, the National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) is thrilled about this acquisition announcement. NCFA & CIX: A Journey Together Over the years, NCFA has had the privilege of walking alongside CIX, celebrating its successes, and learning from its vast experiences. Our partnership has been rooted in mutual respect and a shared passion for fostering innovation in Canada. We've watched CIX grow, evolve, and transform into Canada's largest startup awards program and investment conference. Their annual curation program has consistently showcased the crème de la crème of Canadian startups, attracting attention from North American VCs, corporates, and private equity investors. See: Clay Financial Closes $1.7 Million Pre-Seed to Offer Home Equity Sharing AltFi Product in Canada Both Elevate and CIX have been champions of innovation, tirelessly working ...
AI | Sep 27, 2023 Amazon agrees to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic to compete against other tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia who are heavily invested in the space. The initial investment will see Amazon infuse $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic. Furthermore, Amazon retains the option to increase its investment to a total of $4 billion. Anthropic, backed by notable investors including Google, Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom, has amassed a total funding of $2.7 billion so far, and has ambitious plans. In May of this year, the startup achieved a valuation of approximately $5 billion following a $450 million funding round. The valuation set by Amazon in their recent investment in Anthropic has not been disclosed. For context, OpenAI has already secured more than $11 billion in funding, with a significant portion coming from Microsoft. See: OSFI’s Evolving Focus on Integrity & Security Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years and has recently launched its consumer-facing premium subscription plan of chatbot Claude 2 and has plans to develop a "frontier model" named "Claude-Next." This model is projected to be ten ...
Sep 27, 2023 Citi's groundbreaking partnership with BondbloX underscores the rising prominence of fractional bonds in reshaping the global investment landscape. What are Fractional Bonds? Fractional bonds (see Digital bonds), as the name suggests, allow investors to own a fraction of a bond rather than the entire bond. This concept is similar to buying shares in a company. Instead of purchasing an entire bond, which might be cost-prohibitive for many retail investors, they can buy a fraction of it. This democratizes bond trading, making it accessible to a broader audience. See: Catastrophe Bonds: Killer Use Case for Digital Asset Adoption? The concept of fractional bonds is still relatively new, but it's gaining traction rapidly. Platforms like BondbloX are at the forefront of this movement. BondbloX, which started as BondEvalue, has made significant strides in simplifying bond investing. Their platform allows investors to track and trade bonds electronically, much like stocks. This approach not only makes bond trading more accessible but also integrates the advantages of equities trading into the bond market. Citi and BondbloX's IRL Partnership One of the most notable partnerships in the fractional bond space is between BondbloX and Citi. As we've seen from the recent announcement, Citi ...
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