Osin Finance is a very interesting project. It is a finance application that encourage cross-border payment between individuals (two or more) in different countries with fair exchange rates, reasonable charges while performing other fintech services eg transfer, bills, ecommerce, etc.
Sometime last year, my friends and I were having our regular weekend check-in call when our discussion drifted towards the recent trends with Japa. One of us who was in school as at the time of our discussion complained on how she was finding it difficult to receive her school fees from her dad in Nigeria simply because the exchange rates was a lot. According to her, if she allows her dad to send “her proposed” school fees which was him holding unto the end of his bargain, she is still going to have a lot of problems. But why? Because she had to wait and compare the different financial apps and their different exchange rates, now she is behind schedule in payment because it takes about 6 working days before she receives the money. Also, she will have to borrow money to complete it cause the exchange rate are outrageous. Exactly why she called us, she needed help completing the money.
While we walked around in solving our friends problem and getting update on everyone’s wellbeing, our discussion gradually drifted to some of the problems encountered by Nigerians with this recent trend in japa. Especially around the finance sector. So! we decided to dig deeper. That was how we set out to Research.
While greater population of Nigerians are on the search for greener pasture, the effects it’s having on us is a bit more than…I don’t know, the blessings 🤷🏾♀️. The different financial applications are doing their best to encourage cross-border payment for individuals, students, freelancers and companies. Yes, companies too. So during our extensive research including reading up articles and even tweets online, we realized that it’s not only students that are facing these problems…it covers the means through which companies pay their international employees. It also covers process by which freelancers receive their pay.
For something this important, involving almost all personas in Nigeria…shouldn’t we offer some help? This initial ideation / problem identification process helped us decide that we are going on with this project and…we are definitely going to build a solution that solves a problem.
Study on cross-border payment:
We set up meeting on google calendar (aside from our weekly check-in meeting) where we will talk and walk through this project.
We had task around reading through and summarizing what cross-border payment entails