Money-Transfer Services
AFRICON Group and CosmosBridge join forces (as a Joint Venture) for the expansion of the Western Union network in African countries, with special emphasis in retail non-bank locations.
In most areas of the world (including USA and all Europe), money transfer is a financial non-banking service, that can be easily found in retail non-banking locations, whereas in some African countries money transfer is still considered as a banking activity and can be performed only through banking locations.
With the suitable change and/or adjustment in a country’s Legal & Regulatory environment, if needed, there is a big opportunity in African countries to expand money transfer in Retail Chain locations, something that will make the service more widely accessible to customers and will bring incremental revenues to cooperating Retail Chains (Associates) and the Country.
CosmosBridge’s background…
CosmosBridge belongs to the same entrepreneurial Group, that owns by majority or participates through affiliates in the below Western Union Reprsentatives/Agents:
- WorldBridge – Payment Institution S.A., a payment institution fully licensed by the Central Bank of Greece. The Company has been the main Representative/Agent of Western Union in Greece since 1992 and offers Western Union services in the country through a retail network of more than 1,100 locations.
- EKI Transfers D.o.o and Montenegro Transfers, two payment institutions licensed by the Central Bank of Serbia and Montenegro respectively, which are the main Western Union Representatives/Agents in these two countries with a total of more than 1,540 locations.
- BPN Odeme Kurulusu A.S., a payment institution in Turkey, licensed by the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency of Turkey, which started to operate last year as the exclusive retail Western Union Representative/Agent in Turkey and which has signed up already more than 900 locations.
The above entities and CosmosBridge are experts in developing retail Western Union networks and their participation in this Joint Venture project promises a successful, profitable and easy roll out of the service in any market.
Large Scale Cryptocurrency Mining and Research
AFRICON has collaborated with the largest full-service blockchain technology company in the world, in order to participate in the development of a very large scale cryptocurrency mining facility.
Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin’s, or any other cryptocurrency for that matter, public ledger of past transactions. This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Cryptocurrency nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.
Mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other cryptocurrency nodes each time they receive a block.
The primary purpose of mining is to allow cryptocurrency nodes to reach a secure, tamper-resistant consensus. Mining is also the mechanism used to introduce cryptocurrency into the system: Miners are paid any transaction fees as well as a “subsidy” of newly created coins. This both serves the purpose of disseminating new coins in a decentralized manner as well as motivating people to provide security for the system.
Cryptocurrency mining is so called because it resembles the mining of other commodities: it requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold are mined from the ground.