Palm Beach County, Fl. — Jake Seltzer is bringing a new solution to an old problem. The twenty-six-year-old CEO and co-founder of Finance Blocks recently doubled down on the push for inclusion in the global financial landscape with a 25 million dollar capital commitment from Global Emerging Markets to continue efforts to digitize rural financial institutions (RFIs) in emerging markets and promote accessibility, transparent banking services, and financial inclusion.
Born and raised in Wellington, Florida, the Palm Beach County resident finds himself at the forefront of worldwide impact. The capital investment will propel his blockchain-powered fintech platform into even the most rural corners of the globe, such as India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, and Ghana.
“These funds will allow us to continue developing our technology, expand our development team, onboard over three million users, raise awareness about financial products and services, and allow charitable contributions of water and power to the areas in which we operate,” said Seltzer.
Seltzer co-founded the company in 2019 to support the 25% of the world’s total population that does not have access to basic financial services, known as the unbanked. The unbanked face exploitative repayment terms from informal moneylenders and lack identity documents, credit scores, and awareness about financial products. Historically, the sophistication of blockchain-powered digital products has not reached RFIs and the unbanked.
In its simplest form, Seltzer’s company is a platform that helps RFIs switch from paper-based legacy systems to a secure, easy-to-use, and efficient digital system for all their processes. It creates unique digital identities, computes credit scores, manages financial data, loans, savings accounts, and more on a single platform. Users, or the formally unbanked, have an app that helps them stay instantaneously updated about their financial activity like withdrawals, deposits, transactions, loans, and interest. Based on the age of their account and financial activity, users are given Smart Credit Scores computed by blockchain-powered smart contracts.
Blockchain technology is an integral component of the solution Finance Blocks presents.
“Blockchain technology plays a crucial role in lifting people out of poverty and providing better services to the populations of low and middle-income countries. It is a system of recording information that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. Think of blockchain as an incorruptible digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. This process can be transformative for low and middle-income countries as corruption is the single largest issue affecting the unbanked,” says Seltzer.
Seltzer believes this technology will directly impact the global economy by way of the youth. Referring to them as “innovators of tomorrow,” Seltzer believes financial and investing literacy will encourage higher education and break generational debt while creating new generations of middle class.
Global digitization will help the unbanked achieve upward economic mobility by providing the right financial tools in their hands. RFIs are then empowered with the resources and infrastructure to achieve their aims. To learn more about Finance Blocks, visit https://financeblocks.io or email [email protected].
