If you cut out the transfer agent, those people in the corner shops who handle actual cash, the opportunities for fraud go down. “One of the reasons money transfer is expensive today is because of fraud.” “We are looking into all the services that these migrants go to the corner shop for,” he said. By allowing migrants to top off the mobile cards of people in their home countries, Rebtel hopes to take a piece of that market. Migrants send home about $600 billion annually – their contributions can make up as much as 20% of the GDP in some countries, Larsson said. Having found a sweet market, Rebtel is now looking to expand services in it. Profitable, it has so far received $20 million of funding from Index Ventures and U.K-based Balderton Capital. His co-founders at the new version of the company are Johan Granlund, Jonathan Frisk, Johan Dahlqvist, and it’s recently added Cecilia Englen as a top executive. Larsson, an executive at a large Swedish mobile operator, took the helm at Rebtel in 2015, when it was a struggling calling card company. The pricing towards customers had to go up.” “Nigeria had a regulatory change of increasing prices drastically 1.5 years ago. You cannot change what happened,” Larsson said. “The worst days has been when political issues in some countries have inflicted our business. A handful of countries, including places like Nigeria and North Korea, are much more expensive because of regulations in those countries. Rebtel covers 70% of the world with a $10 a month calling plan. For instance, there are about 5 million Indians in the Western World, Larsson said. Many more are the people who populate the highly concentrated ethnic communities that make cities so vibrant, like Ethiopians in Washington, D.C., Cubans in Miami or Nigerians in Houston. Refugees are forced to flee because of war, persecution or a natural disaster. The words “migrant” and “refugee” have meshed in many people’s minds, but refugees make up only about 10-15% of the world’s migrants, most of whom move by choice for economic opportunity. Rebtel burrows in to individual migrant communities. But the majority of the revenue still flows to traditional telecommunications companies, Larsson said. Other similar apps, like China's WeChat, have monetized by selling ads and games. The largest tech player in the $90 billion international calling market is WhatsApp, which is used by more than 1 billion, though its revenue model is still unclear. “They have a small child and maybe are not working full time.” “A very strong group has been mothers,” Larsson said. They earn about $20 an hour by downloading another app that allows them to resell minutes, according to Rebtel. The company has about 10,000 people in its re-seller program. Second, Rebtel has hit on a marketing plan that puts it front-and-center in migrant communities: It pays migrants to sign people up. (More than 2 billion people around the world don’t have high-speed Internet, according to the company). That’s important for migrant communities, because many of them come from places that don’t have high-speed Internet. First, its app scans the available technology in a country to place calls over phone lines, low-speed networks or high-speed Internet whatever is available, to deliver high-quality calls at any given moment.
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