Legacy remittance systems are plagued with high fees, long wait times, and a lack of transparency, negatively impacting the more than 200 million migrant workers who send remittances every year. Cryptocurrency aims to revolutionize the remittance sector by eliminating middlemen, providing real-time transaction visibility, and reducing costs.

While still in the early stages, a decentralized digital identity could be a gamechanger for financial and social inclusion by providing individuals with a trusted form of identification that is secure, accessible, fraud proof, gives them true ownership over their personal data, and provides them with access to vital financial and social services.

In episode 97, we’re excited to welcome Victor Texeira, Lead Crypto Economist from Canza Finance, “an Open Finance Portal enabling access to unlimited financial services for emerging markets.” We discuss how Web3 and DeFi can bridge the gap to financial services for small businesses in emerging economies, some of the barriers to financial inclusion for the unbanked and financially underserved, why Africa is at the frontier of the Decentralized Finance movement, and much more.

Over the past couple of years, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) movement has made enormous strides in working towards a world where everyone, regardless of where they were born, has the ability to access financial instruments and services to improve their lives. In this blog post, we highlight five projects using DeFi to build financial capacity in unbanked communities.