Kora Network – Connecting capital, communities and people

Introduction

The word Kora originates from “kora” which is a musical instrument famous among Western and Eastern Africans, played as a sign of passing a message of hope. Kora’s mission is ambitious and that is banking the unbanked. Kora indeed is a hope for who are deprived of access to financial services such as access to credit due to the expensive and troublesome procedures involved. The list of reasons is endless. The main being the high costs of financial services for example bank charges. Next comes the lack of proper identity of each individual. People in these areas are also less encouraged to reach a bank due to the lack of banking locations. Finally trust becomes an issue. Most people deprived of financial systems don’t trust these financial institutions. They are not sure what becomes of their money when they are handed over to these institutions.

One of the key problems of existing financial platforms of the like of Kora is the steep learning curve. Most of these platforms aren’t user friendly. It takes a great deal of time and effort to understand how to use these platforms, but now with Kora’s easy to use platform the steep learning curve becomes much shallower.

It’s not surprising that theses underserved people are unable to afford a smartphone by themselves, just question yourself, is it really reasonable to drop this people just because they cannot access a smartphone. Obviously no. That’s why Kora let people access it’s network via SMS or USSD on fairly usable phones. For those who are already updated with technology you folks have the Kora app backed by blockchain technology.

The Kora Network once launched will be used money transfer and payments at ease simply from mobile phone to mobile phone via text messages. It will also be used for lending and loaning credits.

Vision

Millions of adults worldwide don’t have a bank account, instead they are unbanked. So why is Kora unique and different from every other block chain startup? Because for the first time this challenge is going to be tackled by someone who understands what it means to be unbanked. Dickson Nsofor- CEO & Co-founder of Kora Network. Being born and bred in a small city in the North central city of Nigeria, he grew up witnessing and experiencing poverty, people earning less than 2 USD a day. The reason behind many people being unbanked is that the financial providers themselves have to bear huge costs just to keep running and operating. Now with the arrival of block chain technology there is really no need for a central financial provider. Since it is a decentralized database so nobody needs to pay for the data to be stored or to be transacted. One aspiring thing about the block chain is that it reduces the overhead of running a platform to basically zero. The capital being tied down from people being unbanked is enormous. Renowned economist Hernando de Soto once stated “The poor don’t lack capital, they just can’t monetize it. Fixing this issue would be the greatest thing anybody can do to foster economic growth. If the capital of the unbanked can be monetized, approximately 10 trillion USD is then released into the open economy. From a technology point of view Kora Network can be called as an infrastructure for an inclusive financial system. Kora network is an AWS platform that enables MFIs, MSBs or any service provider in the financial service industry to get a turn-key solution to serve their customers including the underserved.

Kora Network Token (KNT)

KNT will be the only method which you can pay for services in the network. Kora Network Token short for KNT is a token built on the Ethereum platform. The network only accepts payments sent by ETH to their public address. 1 KNT is currently 0.10 USD. In order to invest in Kora you must be ready for a minimum investment of 5000 USD. The hard cap is 24 000 000.

Team