Coins.ph, the Philippines based bitcoin wallet and money transfer service has launched a new mobile application called Teller. The application currently available on Google Play Store provides information about the nearest cash in and cash out locations across Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.
Coins.ph offers blockchain powered money transfer services in Southeast Asia. Coins.ph users can use digital money for remittances and mobile phone top-ups. When the user wants to fill his wallet with digital currency for remittance purpose or wants to cash out the received digital money, he can just go to a third party seller and exchange digital money for local fiat currency or vice versa.
The value of digital money held in the wallet will be same as local currency and all transactions with digital money will be in denominations of local currency itself. All digital money transactions will be done over blockchain for accountability.
According to the CEO of Coins.ph, Ron Hose the Teller app takes the company one step closer to its mission of making its money services independent of conventional financial framework. Coins.ph already offers merchant payment processing services and bitcoin funds withdrawal from selected bank ATMs. The Teller app offers more convenience to people when they don’t have access to ATMs.
Hose acknowledged that Teller bears some resemblance to another service, Abra. He also added that services like Teller and Abra are important for developing nations due to the presence of large unbanked population and many can’t afford the costs associated with traditional banking system. It will not be possible for banks to serve the unbanked by opening more branches as most of the unbanked come from economically weaker sections of the society and they will not be able to maintain the minimum balance in their bank accounts. In such scenarios, banks will end up losing money due to less deposits and low transaction volumes.
Alternative bitcoin based financial systems like Abra and Coins.ph can bridge the gap between the banked and unbanked population as charges associated with bitcoin transactions are negligible in comparison to traditional banking system.