Summary
Making cryptocurrency payments easier to use is as much a challenge as building the infrastructure behind them, Breet chief operating officer Vivian M…
Making cryptocurrency payments easier to use is as much a challenge as building the infrastructure behind them, Breet chief operating officer Vivian Mbene told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos on Wednesday.
Mbene said the company’s biggest task was making a complicated product appear simple to customers, allowing businesses to accept digital assets without taking on the operational demands of managing them.
Breet, founded in 2019, converts cryptocurrency into cash for individuals in Nigeria and Ghana. It also offers an application programming interface that allows businesses to accept crypto payments and receive settlement in local currency.
The proposition separates the payment method from the currency a merchant ultimately wants to hold. Customers can pay with digital assets, while businesses receive local money without having to build a crypto operation of their own.
For Mbene, the objective is to reduce the work required to complete that transaction. “We’re just obsessed with simplicity,” she said.
That approach places much of the complexity behind the scenes. Functions such as monitoring transactions, routing deposits and converting currencies need to work together without requiring merchants to manage each step themselves.
But making the process look straightforward can create a different problem: convincing customers and business partners to trust it.
“Sometimes simplicity brings suspicion, and when it’s powered by crypto, the suspicion kind of doubles,” Mbene said.
Her remarks highlighted a tension for crypto payment providers. A simpler interface can reduce the effort involved in using a service, but it does not necessarily remove doubts about the technology underneath it.
Breet’s pitch is that businesses should be able to use crypto as a payment channel while continuing to manage their finances in familiar currencies. For providers pursuing that model, the commercial test is whether they can make accepting digital assets both straightforward and credible to merchants.
Source: TechCabal (Africa)
