You’d think that in this age of computers and lightning-fast Internet money can easily and instantly be transferred to anywhere. You’d be wrong – in fact, dead wrong. Money moves slowly, and agonisingly so, across numerous banking hubs as it finds a path – or not – to the intended recipient.
The framework to move money around the global village – at last count about $21tn annually – was conceived and implemented in the early 1970s: an era when telegrams were a means of conveying short messages, offices came equipped with noisy telex machines, and telephones were bulky devices with a rotary disk and tethered to a wall outlet by an always-too-short cable.
The way in which money is moved around the world is long overdue for a serious overhaul. While almost everybody seems to agree, nobody has actually done something about this sorry state of affairs. That is, nobody but Hank. Mr Uberoi has set his mind – and the tidy sum he accumulated as a venture capitalist – to devising a more up-to-date way for shifting cash.
Calling it the single largest opportunity he ever came across, Mr Uberoi got down to business and acquired Earthport – a small London-based payment processing company that he transformed into a ground-breaking business for moving large volumes of money by leveraging the power of cloud computing to speed-up transfers.
Initially dismissed as a pie-in-the-sky outfit, Earthport now counts some of the world’s greatest companies and entities amongst its clients such as the World Bank, Western Union, Bank of America, and many other of the world’s most respected brands.
Earthport works with banks to streamline money transfers, rather than against them. The firm is currently expanding its operations exponentially in order to achieve the economies of scale that drive down costs even further. Overtures have been made in India to sign that country’s banks on to its hub-and-spoke system. Other large markets are being broached as well.
The CFI.co judging panel is excited about the Earthport model. The company is not afraid to pioneer new concepts and lacks no ambition either. Earthport is a textbook example of a lean and mean business that squarely aims to disrupt established practice in order to bring in the new. The formula works and offers both payers and payees – and crucially the banks in between – an efficient, safe, and fast alternative to move cash around with a minimum of fuss, effort, and cost. The judges are happy indeed to confer the 2015 Best Cross-Border Money Transfer Solutions Global Award on Earthport.