Beam It Mobile - Money Transfer Service

Beam It Mobile is a Tech Stars graduate from 2011. Their mission is to help people send money from Washington State to the Philippines. The idea for the business came when Matt Oppenheimer was living in Nairobi. Matt was the head global and Internet initiatives banking for Barklays Banking. While in Kenya Matt noticed three things that eventually caused him to start Beam It Mobile. The first thing was that receiving and sending money was Expensive and there were often hidden fees and foreign exchange rates that people didn't understand. The second thing was that it was a slow process, it could take up to two or three days for the money to be delivered to the person. And the third thing was that almost everyone had a mobile phone but very few had a personal computer.

So when Beam It Mobile moved out to Seattle Washington to be a part of the Tech Stars program they found that the Filipino (or Pinoy) community sent back $300 Million dollars a year to the Philippines. In looking at just the Philippines the country receive a total of $7.6 Billion dollars a year from around the world each year in remittance. However Beam It Mobile is only starting with the Philippines and with Washington State, they will be helping other countries like Mexico and India receive money as well someday and expanding to other states like California and New York. The US sends over $75 Billion dollars back to family in their home countries every year. The World Bank calculates that over $325 Billion a year is transferred every year. That is an impressive almost $1 Billion dollars each day that is transferred. Surprisingly 80% of the transfers are done outside the banking system. They are done with agents and remittance companies.

Beam It Mobile will allow companies to send money from a mobile phone to any other mobile phone in the recipients home country. This will allow the transfer to be instant and feel more real. The most important part of this is that the transactions are so convenient, why visit a store when you can use your smart phone to transfer money directly from your linked bank account to your family.  The simple vision is that they want anyone to be able to send money without visiting a store or bank. They want people to use a phone and not have to go in to a physical store. Western Union and Xoom use transitional offline channels and cause extra overhead. Mobile Wallets are expected to have 750 Million users by 2015. The wave of mobile banking is coming and especially in developing countries.

The best part is that Beam It Mobile plans to use Facebook and the social graph to leverage existing users. The cool part is that Facebook is the most used website in the Philippines right now and that is similar to a lot of developing countries. There are actually phones being sold that have physical facebook buttons in these countries.

Beam It Mobile has already closed a $750,000 convertible note round. They are now in the process of raising a series A round.