Khalid Keenan’s Post

The rise of emerging market talent in the professional remote workforce is undeniable. It's clear from the increasing number of engineers, product managers, and designers on the likes of #Toptal, #Turing, and #Crossover. Salaries and contract rates are also trending upward accordingly. However, there remains a glaring discrepancy in that increased earnings for professionals are usually rewarded with a wider selection of financial services at preferential rates. An experienced backend engineer from the US who has worked their way up to contracting on Toptal will be offered premium banking products, a variety of credit options, and access to investments across global markets. That same engineer domiciled in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, or the Philippines will simply be frozen out. Why the geographical blocker? The short answer is risk-appetite. Financial institutions calculate and categorise the risk of a potential customer during the KYC (Know Your Customer) process. Factors including country, industry, age, and a customer's background are used to make a decision on how risky a customer is perceived to be. Unfortunately, most institutions won't get past the country. In some cases, that may be inevitable with countries under sanctions or restrictive regulations, but that's a minority. The likely reason is that they tend to rely on global risk assessments produced by international organisations and credit agencies, accounting for macro factors (e.g., currency and political risk) that, while important, are out of the control of our backend engineer.   At Elevate, we take a different approach. KYC stands for Know Your Customer, not Know Your Country. There's a lot more you can learn about a customer beyond their country of residence. What profession are they in? What's their work history? Are they banked? Do they work for well-known companies? How active are they on LinkedIn?   Our backend engineer, with over 7 years of experience and a great reputation amongst colleagues and employers, who happens to live in an emerging market shouldn't automatically be bucketed into a category of customers more likely to commit fraud. In fact, it's likely the risk posed by our engineer would be significantly lower than that of a substantial population of customers in more developed economies.   Taking the time to delve deeper into understanding our customers at Elevate is operationally more challenging and adds friction to the onboarding experience. But doing so over time will help us prove that our community of remote workers across emerging markets are among the lowest-risk and highest-value customers. Offering a premium USD banking product for remote workers around the world is only the start. We're aiming to unlock financial products enjoyed by counterparts in developed markets to continue supporting emerging market talent to earn and grow their wealth.   #KnowYourCustomerNotYourCountry #RemoteWork #GrowYourWealth