What did you talk about while at the LAUNCH festival?

Please see the below transcript from Access Network's pitch at the LAUNCH festival.

Jason: Next up is Access Networks, or Access Network.

Micky: It's just one network.

Jason: It's just one network, Access Network. What's your name?

Micky: It's Micky Costa.

Jason: Correct.

Micky: Hello.

Jason: Everybody meet Micky. Micky, you nervous at all?

Micky: More excited I think.

Jason: You're excited?

Micky: Yeah.

Jason: I like it.

Micky: First time in Australia.

Jason: Oh great. Where are you from?

Micky: New York.

Jason: Where in New York?

Micky: The city.

Jason: Manhattan?

Micky: Manhattan.

Jason: Where in Manhattan?

Micky: The financial district.

Jason: Okay, fidi, very good. Three, two, go.

Micky: So there are over six billion people in the world with little to no financial access today. They are most concentrated heavily in sub Saharan Africa. Reason for this is pretty simple. Banking infrastructure costs a lot of money. And when banks look at this, they literally think it's not worth it. And the answer is pretty simple, to have branchless infrastructure, which is basically just people banking each other.

Micky: I'd like you to meet Felix. Felix gets paid to be a banker to those in his community. And he walks around every day with just a smart phone, collecting loans, giving out withdrawals, and can also offer micro loans. For providing this financial access to over three hundred people in his community every month, he's paid $500 dollars from them individually, and he's literally empowering them now to kind of be plugged in and have access to greater things. And he's not alone. Felix is one of 50 banking agents, servicing over 30,000 customers at our company, Atlas Money, that came out of tech stars and has been operational and gone into Senegal for the past two years.

Micky: So what does this infrastructure of Felix unlock and enable? Well, pretty much everything else from loans to eCommerce to micro insurance. In essence, it unlocks trillions of dollars in untapped value. And there's a big need to decentralize this environment. There is too many Felixes we need to get going to be infrastructure, and there's way too many applications we need to build on top of this to get the economy going. And that's why we are proud to announce Access Network, which is a decentralized world bank. And what that means is pretty simple. It's basically the People's Bank and the People's VC Fund. Using block chain technology and our own access token, we are incentivizing the growth of that human banking infrastructure of people like Felix and incentivizing third party developers to build applications for the network.

Micky: People like Felix now will be rewarded for banking other people in his community, and community members will be rewarded with free access tokens as well, for saving more money or getting more people on board. We're also gonna offer this same kind of incentive structure to people outside of my company, Atlas Money, and actually partner with other existing networks across the world. All token holders get to vote on what applications they want built next. And developers compete to build those. And we pick the best one, and they're rewarded in free tokens as well. The tokens are used to unlock greater usage of these applications. And if there's any service fees attached, paying in the token gets a discount on that fee.

Micky: Where are we today? We have all of our block chain governing small contracts built, our first applications ready to go upon launch, which is free money sending, which is a huge deal for those of you that know the continent well, and our earning incentives are all done as well. We're wrapping up here. What's next? We're finishing our token sale. We're launching in Ghana and Senegal with Atlas Money as our first partner, aptly pursuing partnerships with other exchange networks, getting the developer award system up and running while doing hackathons at the same time, and releasing our second and third apps later this year of a loan application, and an ability to literally co invest in infrastructure projects on the ground like solar panels and things of that sort.

Micky: And that's where Access is a two-way street. Basically, we can unlock this market not just for everyone else, but for ourselves. And we can make money while empowering others. So that's Access Network, and it's truly a place where we can all co create together.

Jason: Okay.

Micky: Thank you.

Jason: Well done. Let's give him a big round of applause. Stonely, why don't you start us off.

Stonly: Sure. So I'm curious. So you're building the platform to build banking related applications or financial related applications. I'm wondering what sort of applications you anticipate will be built. Do you feel like this is a lot of applications, like thousands, millions, infinite, what are some examples? And then, second, what ... I'll leave it at that.

Jason: Andrea?

Andrea: I've got a bit of brain blank. I think I'm just a bit excited by it, but a bit overwhelmed because I'm not sure that I understood it that well. So I'd kind of like a little bit more color on how it works really.

Micky: Sure.

Jason: Matthew.

Matthew: Is there anyone else doing this, I guess, with the block chain sites? 'Cause there's other people that do micro loans, right?

Micky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sure.

Jason: Yeah. And finally, I too, like Andrea was a bit confused because there's just ACX Network, Access Network, Atlas Bank, and I didn't understand which business is yours. Is Atlas your customer, or is your customer the people, or is your customer the developer? And I understand you're doing something unique, but there's a token sale involved as well. So I'm just a little confuse candidly and wanna know what is Access Networks versus Atlas, which is your business?

Micky: I'll probably lunk you two in together at the end if that's okay. So if I recall you properly, it was kind of what applications do I see being fruitfully developed? Well, first and foremost, it's really important that you kind of put in the incentive and architecture in place where it's a self sustaining development ecosystem. We've lived on the ground for a couple of years, and kind of know the ones that are gonna work. We're gonna build them ourselves as the network kind of nurtures and can develop on its own incentivizing, and voting, and creating more applications it wants.

Micky: That will be pretty endless. It could be feature fixes. It can be a micro loan application. So we know on the ground doing micro loans with success that people want access to loans so badly. I know through partnerships we can create here, that eCommerce will take a market loan from changing no behavior, and making $10,000 a year from $1,000. I know that's important. Micro insurance would do well. A lot of people love funeral insurance in places like Ghana for example. There's just a lot to do. So we're gonna will into existence our own.

Micky: The free money sending is kind of a biggy. Right now, you have billions of dollars being sent in countries like Ghana with competing tele coast that all charge high fees to send money. So making that free, I think, will net a lot of user for us over all. Gotta move on for time, but happy to talk more about that. Lumping you guys in at the end, so real quick if you can remind me ... oh, who else is doing this?

Micky: This is kind of like the holy grail of the block chain space for a long time, and no one's done it. So we were a block chain company the whole time and decided to skip the conferences and move down to Africa and really figure it out and admit we know nothing. And talk to women in the community and figure out what they do. So the biggest disadvantage I'd say to other people is that there's maybe like four or five projects nibbling at this. No one has boots on the ground. If you don't have that, it's all theory. You can't buy theorem or a token in a country where you don't have a bank account.

Micky: Two, they're not architected in a way that really takes care of the needs of that human infrastructure in developing more tools. That ties in to the last thing to give you more color on how we got here. The product market fit we have today as like the Uber for banking, we found in the market of people banking each other, just was kind of like a trustless system. So we came in with smartphone apps and SMS notifications and taking care of the supply chain of money to make it more trustless. And that's really how it works. And that's how Atlas works. It's really this Uber for banking model. We kind of cracked the code.

Micky: And it seems pretty simple on hindsight. Now, that's my company. We become like a crypto exchange on this network and the networks first kind of partner. The whole point of this now is this is a decentralized network. I don't own this. Token holders own this. And it's open. I'm kind of punting on a lot of unicorn value we could have created and for the good of the mission really.

Jason: Okay. Let's give it up for Access Network.

Micky: Thank you.