Empowch’s founder Moataz and I recently sat down with our colleague Abudi, an intern who is working on some interesting facets of the financial services system as Empowch navigates towards bringing more equity to the financial services sector, particularly in the MENA region. We discussed how Empowch’s self-custody wallets use blockchain technology and mobile phone technology to provide the highest level of security, securing not only your phone but also your own self custody mobile blockchain wallet.  

Abudi is an international student who attended Waterford Kamhlaba UWC, a United World College school in southern Africa. This was his first exposure to the global population, and the UWC model is to bring high-achieving students from every country in the world together to learn from each other, as well as from some of the best teachers in the IB field. Waterford was established in defiance of the apartheid government’s racial segregation policies. It has an amazing history. 

We recorded a zoom call (you can watch it on our Youtube or TikTok), in which I was interested in knowing what challenges an international student faces, coming from Somalia, graduated IB in Eswatini (previously Swaziland) and now studying at Lake Forest College. 

Abudi flagged two key issues: payments, which is sending and receiving funds, and financial education.  

Payments are what Empowch is currently working on, but as we grow, education will become a key component to the success of financial inclusion which is a key achievement of Empowch. Blockchain technology can transform payments, creating true sovereign ownership potential of your information, your value, and your collective wealth through self-custody mobile wallets, which are like email addresses that can store all your own data in fortress technology. 

High remittance fees and slow speeds are always the most common complaints of cross-border payments, but with Empowch, that no longer happens. Payments are instant and free under $300 per month and only 1% thereafter, even if neither side has a bank account. This is what blockchain and crypto are doing for the world of finance. It’s not speculative crypto, it’s utility crypto and it has the potential to empower millions of unbanked people globally. 

Financial education is needed in every sector of society, and trust in the information is what will differentiate and motivate peoples’ choices and Empowch will be a leader in sourcing and securing collaborations with partners that provide the best value and equity to their communities. The time of the freelancer to transform to a digital economic presence has come and blockchain technology and Web3 are there for that. 

One of our first collaborations is with a forward-thinking freelancer platform called Forlanso based in the UAE, that is transforming the freelancer landscape and model in a way that has not been done before. Web3 will transform every industry, and these kinds of products and platforms are coming to market right now, so exponential growth is on the horizon.  

Self-custody mobile blockchain wallets will safely and securely store all your data on your own blockchain wallet that only you can access and control. All representations of value can now be digitized and stored on these wallets. You can hold gold tokens, pegged to gold being held in a vault and is always pegged to the full value of gold, so when you sell, you get gold at that day’s value in whatever you decide to hold, and no middlemen are required. Empowch is not a middleman or gatekeeper. We provide our Platform as a Service (PaaS), where we connect self-custody wallets in an easy-to-use interface to send and receive digitized value, and where we connect multiple third parties to users of self-custody wallets. With interoperability, we provide the payments platform for that, all using mobile technology. 

With this, we are working to solve the problems Abudi raises in our Zoom. Watch the whole episode on our YouTube channel. 

Download the Empowch app and start helping us build our country specific networks by testing the functionality of the wallet and let us know all your feedback.