Blockchain has been around for over 10 years now, and many players are tapping into every use case they could build on top of the technology. One of the industry players in the Philippines getting into the technology is SurgePay.
On the sidelines of the Philippine Blockchain Week 2023, CoinGeek Backstage had a chance to speak with the company behind Surgepay, Direct Agent 5 (DA5), to learn more about what the app can do and how it was established.
DA5 has been up since 2006 and is one of the agents of Western Union. According to its CEO and President, Raymond Babst, since its inception, the firm has grown to have around 3,000 branches; however, with the after-effects of the pandemic, the company had to scale back and close some of its branches. DA5 has also gained Electric Money Issuers (EMI), Operator of Payment System (OPS), Electronic Payment and Financial Services (EPFS), and Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) licenses from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)—making them one of the licensed entities in the Philippines that could offer digital currencies.
This year, the company launched SurgePay, a free digital currency wallet that lets users access their Bitcoin assets via mobile. With this “community app,” as Babst called it, DA5’s goal is to bring down the cost of remittances for migrant workers.
“For the last 17 years, my tagline has always been fast, reliable, and convenient,” Babst said. “Blockchain allows me to basically have a secure way of sending money without having to go to the fiat rails. Using blockchain brings down the cost from an average of 6 to 7% to about 1%.”
Speaking more about the blockchain landscape and adoption in the Philippines, Babst says that “everything boils down to who [blockchain players] partner with” and what users want.
“As the months and years go by, this community will grow larger and larger, and mass adoption will be here,” he assured.
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Also speaking with CoinGeek Backstage‘s reporter Claire Celdran is Charles Inducil, head of blockchain at DA5 and founder of SurgePay, who talked about their vision with SurgePay.
“What is SurgePay like, and is it another digital wallet? Those are the questions that kind of reverberate around the industry,” Inducil pointed out. “The way that we’re positioning SurgePay is a platform to empower communities across the Philippines and around the world.”
How can they do that? Inducil explained that SurgePay will still act similarly to traditional digital currency wallets, but with every transaction in the app, they will be donating PHP1 to an underprivileged community that the users choose. Another feature the blockchain head revealed is community tagging, wherein users can tag any community partners they want, and SurgePay will help them get verified.
“So we are pushing communities further, and this is something that we’ve kind of solved,” he shared. “When the pandemic hit, the biggest hit are donations [for] churches and organizations because the priority of people is survival…so we realized we need a platform, and so happens blockchain provides us with a certain technology to enable this—this way of giving back.”
Aside from the donation feature, SurgePay also allows users to play games with their NFT storage system, making it an everything app.
“I think nowadays it’s not really about building a super app. Like for me, I’m advocating towards building a super ecosystem where you have multiple applications, interoperable across all chains. That’s the way that you’re going to win this game,” Inducil pointed out.
More insights were shared during the second PBW2023, so if you want to catch up, check our Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 recaps. If you like to learn more about SurgePay, visit their website here.
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