Accrue: Commercial Viability and Required Infrastructure for Direct and Flexible Payout Options — Grant Report #1

David Benoit — Tue, 17 May 2022 16:50:22 +0000

The project continues apace. While we have verbal agreements in place with multiple partners, the biggest challenge we have at this time is the responsiveness and timeliness of these large organisations. Getting contracts, NDAs, and live credentials has proven to take longer than hoped.

Project Update

Price negotiations have been a big win for SumAssembly - we’ve asked for the moon and gotten halfway there. All cost assumptions in our original estimations have been lowered.

In doing our research on the partner ecosystem, we found that a few partners we initially identified were not as robust in their offering as other companies that we were not at that time aware of. Doing extra research at this stage has gotten us to a better selection of partners at lower cost than initially thought possible.

Progress on objectives

For this research project, we defined success as identifying and engaging partners to serve significant geographical areas while addressing regulatory, cost, and operational requirements.

By this definition, we have had quite a bit of success. Payouts are hard not because the ultimate movement of money is hard; rather, it’s hard because of all of the partnerships and requirements that are necessary. Nobody in payments does anything alone, and forming these important relationships takes time. This has been by far the most time-consuming part of the project, but we have had success in getting to the “verbal agreement” stage with almost all partners.

We have determined ideal partners and secured verbal commitment in the following categories:

Money movement
Treasury management (foreign exchange, etc.)
KYC processes
User bank deposit information

We have completed money movement, treasury management, and KYC workflows and ensured that these flows pass regulatory and compliance checks. KYB workflows are still outstanding.

Key activities

We have been able to identify regulatory issues around this service, as well as relevant regulatory requirements in all target markets.

We completed a prototype implementation of user bank deposit information, but because our original partner could not service all target markets, we started over with implementation with a new partner.

Our next challenge is to fully identify all operational requirements, dependencies, and the implementation and delivery plan.

Communications and marketing

We have not discussed our work in public at this time. Once we have proven money flow, we will market our services.

What’s next?

During the remainder of the grant period, we intend to more fully identify bank alternatives in target markets, as well as have a fully formed view of the contract matrix for this project to work. We’ll identify how partners work together, and what development and integration is necessary in order to automate operations.

What community support would benefit your project?

We would like to be connected to anyone in the creator community who works with “payout platforms” (any platform that pays its users out) so that we can interview these users to better understand their customer experience.