Ripio, the Argentine cryptocurrency platform landed in Colombia as a result of its expansion plan that it has led in the region since 2013. His country manager, Luc Zuelgarayexplained that among his strategies is deepening financial education about the digital economy and the role of crypto.
(Read: Sales and ‘blockchain’, among the free courses offered by Javeriana).
What led you to arrive in Colombia?
We are in a world of digital economy that is eager for everything but I think that the arrival of a company in a country cannot be done with eagerness and it has to be done with a very strategic action. And in that there are two very big inputs: the internal one, the desire to grow; you look at what the region offers, we study each country and Colombia excels in that. And the other input is that the country already has five million people who are using crypto, a strong attraction for various verticals, the Venezuelan migratory movement that contributed a lot to development; a rejection and a challenge of traditional banking to bankarize all people. Today Ripio’s proposal is not a proposal that goes against the banks, but one that complements the financial system.
I think a lot of people are wrong in thinking that the crypto world wants to replace banking, not at all. What this world does want is to have an offer that complements what banks offer you because crypto does not live in isolation, but rather attached to the financial world.
So, for market opportunity, there is one business and two, for a desire and a purpose that Latin mechanics require a different value proposition.
What does this value proposition consist of?
Ripio does not propose a portfolio of 19,000 cryptos; we do a pretty strong job of content curation, in which today we are proposing less than 20 coins, because what we think is that we could go out in an aggressive commercial way with success or without success, but what we think about is our educational purpose very strong and to the extent that the purpose is understood, the objective of crypto is understood and you can become a user and a client.
That is where Ripio enters the Colombian market to offer all that financial education vertical of the digital economy, blockchain and web3, that for two years we are going to teach people not what our company is, but what the digital economy is and what is Ripio’s value proposition on that.
What is the idea of complementing the financial system?
Nowadays, a human being has a need for money and in that case he approaches a financial entity and requests a loan; or in the other case, he has money and needs to generate investment and when that happens it is to generate profits. That’s where the crypto offering is a complement, that is, if you have a perspective of investing $10 million, you try to understand what percentage you are going to put into crypto, because my role is not to hide the schemes or the volatility, but to explain why is crypto going down, why is it going up. Today crypto is a long-term investment opportunity. You have to kill the very strong paradigms that you are going to become a millionaire in three days.
Luc Zuelgaray
Courtesy
What are the rest of your goals in the country?
There is a first issue that is economic reactivation. We made an investment of more than US$1 million in the rehabilitation of the Metro theater, which is now the Ripio theater. There is a perspective of experience, understanding all the mechanics of the ecosystem. Today I am going to show you what crypto is and in a second step I am going to show you where you can use crypto, both to individuals and to companies, with whom we are talking about how they can start selling with crypto in parallel to the PSE, for example. That is also the purpose of the digital economy.
(Also: The impact of crypto assets on the business model of banks).
Crypto is becoming an alternative and at no time do we want to pit one model against another. When there are already five million people with crypto, you have to offer added value.
What goals do you hope to achieve for the rest of the year?
Let me put it in perspective, in two years we want to achieve a million users in Colombia.
What does Ripio think about crypto regulation projects in the region?
I think regulation is a mandatory step. The volatility that exists today in crypto is due to the lack of an ecosystem. I’m going to make an analogy: what is the wealth of oil? People need it to make plastic products, tank a car, whatever, but the day oil was discovered it had no use, however they understood that it had a value.
In crypto we are at the same moment. We have found that Bitcoin, for example, has a level of security among the highest that exists.
It also has two very important properties: gps less, where we can exchange money in real time no matter where in the world we are, and it is also timeless, where you don’t have to wait for a bank to open to make the transaction. That is where crypto is going today and regulation is going to allow these ecosystems to develop. When a government regulates, it allows the implementation of the tools and then the adoption of an ecosystem, what it will allow is to put an end to the volatility of crypto.
Roberto Casas-Lugo
