Collaborating on mobile banking mainstream adoption
At Airfox, collaboration is helping us further the mass adoption of blockchain-powered payment systems. Our engineering team is preparing to extend our digital wallet to nearly 1,000 physical stores that serve 68% of Brazil’s population.
While our city of Boston has been frantic over whether the Red Sox will win the World Series, the Airfox team has been working around the clock to prioritize features that align with our recent partnership and drive adoption of the Airfox app and AirToken. Now, onto October engineering highlights:
Instant processing of boleto payments
Boletos and utility bills are now approved in real-time, providing users with immediate confirmation of payment without waiting. Users now have instant access to boleto payment processing through our partnership with Qiwi Brasil. (Boleto payments in the app previously took two to three days.) Additionally, the Airfox app now supports boleto payment failover via Qiwi and Fitbank.
Other October updates include bug fixes, security updates, and backend enhancements. Release notes are found here.
Via Varejo partnership progress
Our work with retail giant Via Varejo to extend Airfox financial solutions to millions of Brazilians has kicked off. We are currently focusing on CDCs, which are in-store loans used to purchase large-ticket items like furniture, electronics, and appliances. Customers will be able to pay their Casas Bahia CDC “carnês” bill directly through the Airfox app, instead of going to a physical store. This strategic collaboration allows Airfox to significantly expand our mobile wallet to Via Varejo’s national customer base and drive mainstream adoption. Much more to come!
Brian Kinney promoted to chief software architect
Starting at Airfox less than a year ago, Brian quickly adapted and began supporting the backend architecture of the Airfox app. His experience managing scalable solutions for emerging markets at Jana Mobile and building the next wave of startups at Cogo Labs has proved to be invaluable. Brian holds a B.A. in both math and computing science from Colgate University and has worked in the greater Boston area for the past five years.
Airfox wins international startup competition
You may have read that Airfox was honored with some very exciting news in October. We won a €20,000 grand prize at the international CODE_n startup pitch competition for Best Startup and Best Business Model. Airfox is donating part of the prize money to sponsor financial education courses focused on economic empowerment.
Join our team
Our expanded engineering team, including new Senior DevOps Engineer Ben Higgins, have driven development initiatives such as creating a monitoring system to manage service level agreements and implementing strategies to scale the Airfox app from hundreds to millions of users.
As we continue to grow our engineering team here in Boston and remotely, we’re actively recruiting to expand the Android team with Senior/Principal Engineers. If you’re interested in joining our team to provide affordable financial services to emerging markets, please see our job listing here.
What’s next
There are many services today that developed countries heavily rely on, but require a bank account to access. To combat this problem, Airfox has listened to its user’s requests and is planning to add services like Uber, Netflix, and Spotify to the platform all without needing a credit card or bank account. We’ve also been finishing up our new whitepaper that details our business plan, technology, and mission. We can’t wait to share it.
For more information on Airfox’s financial services platform for emerging markets and AirToken, visit:
- Airfox.com
- AirToken.com
- Telegram
Author: Luke Bayas
Luke is a former entrepreneur with deep experience building distributed web solutions for a variety of companies in the Boston area and beyond. He architected and built the Knack backup, restore & migration systems, he was part of a the NuoDB management layer team dealing with maintenance of a distributed object store as well as building APIs. Additionally, he previously co-founded Locally and was part of the inaugural class of the Iron Yard accelerator in Greenville, SC. At S2 Security, he was a core team member that ported the legacy appliance to a modern infrastructure that now runs on over 20k customer units worldwide.
