How Félix and Bitso power faster and cheaper remittances to Latin America using Stellar

Félix

Bitso

​​In the US, remittances are largely still a manual process. People have to:

• Travel to a money-transfer operator to send or receive a remittance. 
• Pay a transaction fee that can cost an average of $10 on a $300 ticket. 
• Send or receive their remittances in physical cash, which can present safety concerns.
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Yet, remittance senders and recipients go through all this trouble due to lack of more immediate options or hard-wired habits, preferring to talk to a human agent when sending money abroad. But what if there were a way to replicate this human experience via a digital medium, where transaction speeds are near-instantaneous, fees are fractions of a penny, and the entire remittance process is as simple as sending a text?

Cheaper and Faster Remittances for Everyone

• Bitso serves not only more than 5 million individual users, but corporations and institutional clients as well. However, they all face the same issues with traditional remittance flows.
• Traditionally, remittance flows can take a long time, having to go through multiple correspondent banks and different countries. In the end, all of the time consumed and transaction fees often end up being a burden placed directly on the end user.
• Acting on its mission to “make crypto useful,” Bitso saw an opportunity to help their clients move funds quickly and cheaply via USDC on Stellar. Combining the reliability of the world’s leading digital dollar stablecoin and a blockchain’s high speeds and low fees, USDC on Stellar was a natural addition to Bitso’s offerings, allowing Bitso customers to send cross-border payments much more quickly and affordably than before.

Access to Stellar On/Off Ramps

• As a customer of Bitso, Félix has access to USDC, Mexican pesos, and more than 34 other cryptocurrencies available on the platform. Felix can fund its Bitso account either with regular US dollar fiat or USDC.
• Once a Félix user sends a transaction via Whatsapp, those funds are collected as US dollars and converted into USDC once they arrive in Félix’s Bitso account. The USDC can then instantaneously convert into Mexican pesos, which can then travel through local banking rails in Mexico called SPEI.
• SPEI has access to all banks in Mexico, meaning that those remittances are immediately deposited into the recipient’s bank account – all in just a few seconds.

An Easy and Approachable Experience

• Transactions on Félix happen over Whatsapp, and a similarly high penetration rate with . Whatsapp presents several advantages compared to other chat-based apps: the user experience is simple and people can use it even with a slow connection.
• After texting a message to Félix’s Whatsapp line, the sender is greeted by an AI bot and provides transaction details and who the beneficiary is. Redirected to a secure link by the bot, the sender can make the payment with their debit card. Once the transaction is completed, the sender and beneficiary will receive a remittance receipt through Whatsapp. From start to finish, the entire process takes less than a minute on average.
• Throughout the entire transaction process, from when the user opens Whatsapp to when the funds land in the recipient’s bank account, neither the sender nor receiver knows that these remittances are being powered by Stellar or blockchain.