More than three million Brazilians live abroad, almost one million foreigners live in Brazil and roughly 200,000 businesses have headquarters in the country—amounting to $1.5 trillion in global payment transactions to and from Brazil, in 2018. Yet, the process to send money in this region—and globally—is expensive and slow. In partnership with Ripple, BeeTech is on a mission to change this. The company is using RippleNet to revolutionize the customer experience and streamline how Brazil connects with the rest of the world.
BeeTech Co-Founder and CSO Alexandre C.R. Liuzzi knows first-hand the challenges sending and receiving international payments. A native of Brazil, Liuzzi attended university in the United States. His family sent payments to the U.S. for tuition, books, housing and more. The payment took days, if not weeks, to arrive and the high transaction costs left Liuzzi with little leftover funds.
Liuzzi’s personal experience mirrors the stories of many families and businesses around the world. At Swell, he took the stage and opened his discussion with the question, “Why, in an increasingly globalized world, are we limited by our own frontiers?”
In 2016, Liuzzi and BeeTech co-founders, Fernando Pavani and Stefano Milo, set out to create a scalable, cross-border processing platform that enables customers in Brazil to access payments, transfers, investment and credits with ease and low cost. During his Swell presentation, Liuzzi shared how BeeTech is changing the global payments industry for Brazilians with this platform and how Ripple’s technology is helping power it.
Liuzzi explained, “We’re not only a remittance platform, we’re giving access to financial services and removing frontiers to global payments like on-boarding frictions, high transaction costs and a lot of frustration in the process.” He continued, “Since we started, we have transacted more than $1.5 billion and more than 200,000 transactions have been completed,” said Liuzzi.
But the most important statistic to the company is their 89 Net Promoter Score (NPS) for measuring company loyalty—one of the highest in Brazil. “By serving our customers well, they recommend BeeTech to their friends, families and businesses. Today, more than 40% of our new customers come from referrals,” said Liuzzi.
Exceeding their customer’s expectations and needs are at the heart of what makes BeeTech such a force within the Brazilian community. By partnering with Ripple, the company has now been able to reduce costs for their customers, enable real-time pricing and power immediate transaction settlements.
“With Ripple, we’ve standardized the process for integration across different rails and increased efficiency in settlement,” said Liuzzi.
He continued, “We’re saving our customers more than $14 million in transaction fees. We’re talking about families who are sending money to their children studying abroad and small businesses whose main source of income comes from exports. This is huge for them.”
This is just the beginning for BeeTech. The company announced plans to expand across Europe and the U.S in 2020.
We’ll continue to update Insights with more recaps from Swell. Be sure to join the conversation with us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
