Leaf 2021 Year in Review

Celebrating a [busy] successful 2021 and wishing everyone a happy new year!

TL;DR

Leaf 2021 Top Picks

• 15x growth in transactions from 2020! 10x increase in money processed! 4x increase in customer growth! This means we are getting closer to product market fit with high-value customers who love Leaf.
• Full 2021 stats (through Dec. 27): 99,101 transactions, $378,725 processed, 5,440 new customers.
• Featured by Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, in a US House Financial Services Committee hearing as a positive use case for blockchain and stablecoin regulation. Denelle discussed us again in a CNBC interview.
• Launched a new NFT art sales program for refugees in Rwanda to generate income
• Expanded to allow cash-in from the UK, enabling remittances into East Africa
• Designed a full product suite to meet customers’ evolving financial needs:
  –Developed a new lending app, Leaf Loans, to provide small, blockchain-based loans to Leaf Wallet customers (currently in testing)
  –Built a new product and registration process (not yet deployed) in which customers will enter Leaf through “Leaf Lite” by default. Lite is selfie-based and removes the need for identity document verification (a big hurdle for refugees). Customers who choose to upgrade to the full Wallet product will go through Leaf’s existing KYC process.

2021 Awards

• World Changing Idea Award from Fast Company
• Inclusive Fintech 50 list sponsored by Visa
• $220,000 award from the Stellar Community Fund
• $100,000 grant award from UNICEF Innovation Blockchain Fund
• $25,000 grant from the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge

An open letter from the founders of Leaf:

As we reflect on a year of healing in which people, companies, and the world rebuilt from the effects of COVID-19, we are honored that so many of you remain a part of our Leaf story.

UNHCR recently published that, as of the beginning of December, there are 4,899,655 refugees and asylum seekers in the East and Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes Region. Many of these displaced people now call the host countries of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda home. With Leaf’s growing presence in these countries, the company is providing a much-needed solution that enables people to safely secure their money and support friends and family in different locations. Beyond refugees, we have seen how convenient, affordable financial services can impact the lives of traders, business owners, travelers, and everyday people in all of our markets.

It was not an easy year but, looking back, it is easy to see that we were productive despite challenges! We grew, improved, and learned from our mistakes. We became more effective. We refined our value proposition, our customer journey, our revenue model, and our internal culture. Each development cycle becomes quicker as we mature as a team. We are excited to share our progress and thoughts below! Thank you always for being part of our extended team as we enable economic security for the stateless and excluded.

General 2021 Updates

We spent a lot of time in 2021 listening to our customers and working hard to develop features and updates that make it easier to transact locally and internationally. We have shortened the feedback loop for customers and our development team. Most of our new functionality comes as the direct result of customer feedback at this point. Leaf Wallet grew from 1,400 users at the end of 2020 to over 6,800 users to date. The product went through some growing pains at the beginning of the year but has now processed 100,000 transactions and is very stable. We can confidently say we are providing blockchain-based services that fill critical needs in emerging markets! Beyond the growth of users and transactions on the core product, we have started to expand outside of Africa by enabling cash ins from the UK. This will enable more of the traditional remittance use case: money coming into Africa, generally from friends and family members. We have also successfully tested this functionality in France and Spain.

We noticed a gap in our product market fit as we grew this year. Many of our users claimed to have consistent cross-border financial needs but primarily used the product as a domestic wallet. Some said our registration process is too burdensome, requiring a selfie and personal identification document. Others called us regularly to say they needed more functionality and higher limits to support their businesses. This led to defining a product roadmap based on Leaf’s ability to meet customers’ changing financial needs. Leaf Wallet, the existing product, will sit in the middle of the spectrum and will eventually be flanked by Leaf Lite as the default entry point for customers and Leaf Loans, a microlending application that will help Leaf customers jumpstart their businesses and long-term dreams. There is a fourth product — Leaf Life — in the works for more sophisticated financial services aimed at the top tier of users.

With the support of UNICEF, we developed the MVP of Leaf Loans in Q4. The app is now in early testing to provide blockchain-based loans to existing Leaf Wallet customers. Payments can be made directly from customers’ Leaf wallets with no penalty for paying off loans in very small installments. We have also defined and started development of Leaf Lite, a lightweight version of the wallet with very low limits and an easy, selfie-based registration process. This product can be used even by people without valid identity documentation — typically a big barrier for refugees trying to access financial services. By making this the default entry point to Leaf, customers can self-sort by their needs and we can spend resources more effectively. It will change the cost structure of our onboarding, user education, and customer support. Widening the range of services allows product market fit within each vertical instead of trying to change customer behavior or wasting valuable tech. As customers move through the Lite-Wallet-Loans product suite, Leaf can be profitable at each step and equip users with appropriate financial education to make them more financially secure.

Our growing tech team had some of its first external reviews this year to test for both functionality and security. We engaged a security company to run a security audit of the Leaf Wallet backend and frontends. We have also had our tech decisions verified and codebase validated by three external tech companies. We believe strongly that more eyeballs on code are good and that this type of collaboration strengthens our system.

We recently launched an NFT program to help Leaf customers sell digital art across the world (read about our initial experiment and findings here!). These sales help generate life-changing income for the artists. We see a huge gap in what we are calling “impact art” in the global NFT market. We are excited to pioneer this space with our artists, many of whom are refugees. Through Leaf’s NFT program, artists are paid directly into their Leaf wallets from buyers all over the world. Tying together the loans and NFT projects, we are pilot testing a few loans for artists to purchase equipment and software to better develop digital art in early 2022. We are steadily listing new collections from a growing number of talented artists and invite you to check them out!

We continue to be thankful for the Stellar community’s continued support. Tori had the opportunity to announce the NFT program at Stellar’s Meridian Conference. The Stellar ecosystem voted to award Leaf a grant earlier this year (more on that below). Most importantly, we were honored that the CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, Denelle Dixon, testified about Leaf to the US House Financial Services Committee regarding future digital asset and stablecoin regulation (watch it on C-Span). She showcased Leaf as a positive use case for blockchain and spoke about Leaf again on CNBC. Denelle also mentioned Stellar’s exciting work with Moneygram and Tala but highlighted Leaf as one of the first companies in the world actually using Stellar today to help financially excluded customers. We at Leaf are excited to support new legislation that promotes blockchain innovation, especially for structures like ours that utilize stablecoins and seek to integrate with existing licensed financial institutions around the world instead of entirely replacing them.

Cross-Border Growth

Startup advisors always talk about getting a product into the wild as soon as possible. Though Leaf Wallet went live in 2020, our biggest lessons were learned in a huge growth surge in early 2021. We went from a handful of transactions per day to almost a thousand per day at one point as informal business owners jumped onto Leaf. Growth = great. Right? Not always. We intentionally curbed this use case because these domestic transactions were not making us money. Leaf’s primary value add is enabling convenient, affordable cross-border transactions and storing value in multiple currencies. Our revenue model was not set up to support purely domestic payment collection and immediate cash out by users with no churn of funds within the system. We also saw additional risk in providing a service that could be used to circumvent powerful existing players at this stage, especially considering the strong regulation of those existing players in our markets. The growth was exciting but it wasn’t sustainable. We chose to lean in, listen to these users to figure out what gap Leaf was filling for them, and ultimately tweak the product to discourage this use. While we still support domestic transactions, we have been able to hone in on a higher value customer base with needs we can better meet.

Many African countries are leveraging informal cross-border trade for the empowerment of women, poverty alleviation, and peacebuilding. This has led to a growing number of cross-border traders across Africa — a great target customer base for Leaf. For traders, Leaf enables direct payments of commodities bought and sold at borders, easier supplier and customer purchases across currencies, clear exchange rates, and airtime purchase–even during the wee hours of the morning in which traders are typically active before other businesses open. We were honored to be featured by Forbes in a piece about how Leaf provides the cross-border sector with an easy-to-use, affordable money transfer platform. We became a member of the COMESA Business Council in order to reach traders in different border locations and stay informed of policy initiatives across East and Southern Africa.

Along with cross-border traders and refugees, we are working to grow other customer segments with cross-border needs. These include 1) people who send intra-Africa remittances and support family members with items such as school fees in other countries, 2) people who travel across East Africa for business or pleasure and need to take money with them, and 3) businesses who might need to pay people in multiple countries.

Notable Awards

If you have walked with us in this journey, you have helped us reach exciting new milestones. Thank you. Some of these have come in the form of awards and grants. In May, Leaf was selected as the winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Award for Developing-World Technology. World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual award programs and honors products, concepts, companies, policies, and designs pursuing innovation for the good of society and the planet.

Leaf was named to the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) Inclusive Fintech 50 (IF50) list in October, sponsored by Visa. These awards recognize 50 fintech startups leading the way in helping low-income customers and micro, small, and medium enterprises rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 winners were selected from a pool of 377 applicants representing 77 countries, with Sub-Saharan Africa representing 44% of all candidates.

Leaf became a part of UNICEF Innovation Fund’s cohort of companies using blockchain to support the world’s vulnerable and excluded. We were awarded a grant and technical assistance from the fund as part of the program. We were also selected as the third runner-up of Cisco’s Global Problem Solver Challenge, which came with a grant and good exposure to Cisco’s global network. The Stellar Community Fund also awarded varying grants to eight companies, including Leaf, based on voting by key ecosystem players and developers. We were thrilled to be an SCF winner and were able to use the funds to explore new initiatives and geographic expansion.

The importance of reliable financial services, especially for those most excluded, cannot be understated. In a year in which humanity has continued to be isolated by the pandemic, conflict, political discord, and natural disasters, we are finding it even more critical to connect families, friends, and businesses through Leaf. Thank you for making our favorite moments from this year possible and being a part of the Leaf Community.

Happy Holidays!

Leaf-ing around in Rwanda

TL;TFRA (too long; thanks for reading anyway)

We honestly forgot so many of the things we did this year! Recency bias is strong and Covid time is still sometimes a mindbender. Today we are thankful for decent project planning and documentation to remind us of some of the other fun things we did this year, shared with you below.

1. Product enhancement (mostly as a direct result of customer feedback):
   –Added airtime purchase
   –Got USSD live in all countries (Kenya was not live when we launched in 2020)
   –Tested successfully in Chile and spec’d Latin America wallet product
   –Added real-time exchange rates for all the currencies we support
   –Added live in-app chat for customers who need help
2. Market research for expansion
   –Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Haiti, Venezuela): conducted customer interviews, did UI/UX testing, created customer waitlist
   –US: in various stages of partnership development with 4 licensed MSBs in the US to enable sending/receiving with East Africa
3. Business model: experimented with unit economics and revenue model to become more sustainable after initially getting in the market and seeing how people use the product
4. Built a real-time reporting dashboard
5. Vastly improved our customer-facing marketing, defined our brand and social media presence
6. Tweaked and improved blockchain engine to account for edge cases that can happen with blockchain volume surges and consensus issues
7. Implemented a referral bonus program for customers who refer others to Leaf
8. Integrated with 3 backup aggregators to reduce the risk of dependency and downtime on cash in/cash out
9. Fully migrated to AWS and then restructured our AWS infrastructure to containerized microservices to support cost-efficient scaling
10. Invested in customer education since many customers do not have any history with apps or financial tools.
    –Example campaigns: no need to create duplicate accounts, self-service customer support for basic functions like password reset, percentage-based fees are the same no matter how much you withdraw (2% of a big amount is the same as 2% of smaller transactions that equal the same big amount)
11. Dealt with our first fraud case and were able to provide more-than-adequate information on the customer and attempted transaction
12. Conducted regular win/loss interviews with customers across all markets
13. Improved system cleanup and maturity: introduced more nuanced error logging and application monitoring, increased automated fixes and maintenance, added thorough documentation for APIs and all resources
14. Onboarded ~20 sales agents and refined our hybrid digital/in-person customer acquisition model
15. Commissioned research into a governance token and ESG token for Leaf in the future
16. Refined account and transaction limits based on user behavior
17. Spent a lot of time on due diligence efforts (varying results)
18. Developed bulk payment solution on Leaf for businesses to pay salary to employees or to disburse bulk donations
19. Explored the legal, marketing, ethical, data, and security aspects of collecting donations to be split between Leaf’s refugee customers through WSA Youth For Innovation program

If you made it this far, you are the real MVP of 2021! Thanks for being with us along the way.