Mara is a platform that leverages blockchain technology
and it's designed to bring financial freedom and literacy to the African market.
Hi, my name is Chris Bradshaw
I led the Mara Strategy Initiative.
My job really was to understand how we're going to bring this
amazing financial product for people, mainly in Africa
to help them to transact cash and crypto together
and also to work on how to send money between each of them safely and securely.
Hi, I’m Dearg. I am the co-founder and CTPO of Mara,
which basically means I head of all things engineering and product combined.
Mara’s intention is to be able to bridge the gap between very difficult
financial services and the lack of solid infrastructure on the ground
with modern day technology, real time transaction clearance
and of course cryptocurrency as a back end leverage for that.
We're focused on targeting Crypto-curious rather than crypto-experienced.
Bringing people into crypto for the first time,
or alternative finance in fact, for the first time.
Rather than just have a belly hunch about what you're trying to build.
Infinum allowed us to kind of focus on the validated data
and then follow that data rather than just guess at that, which is very dangerous.
Infinum definitely allowed us to focus on what a true MVP would be,
which was really useful.
So Infinum basically had to come in and figure out the strategy first and foremost.
The client had a big vision but needed a team to rapidly
get them to market and to figure out how we're going to build,
design, launch and ship this product in a short space of time.
Availability of the top talent that we needed was critical in order
for us to to achieve this kind of success at this stage of our growth.
The speed was really quick.
I mean, we had prototypes ready,
I feel like in only a few weeks from my own memory.
We were developing code within a week or two after that.
When we launched, we had around a million users ready to use this product.
Our technology had to basically stand the test of growth and significant scale.
From everyone that stops me to speak to me about the project.
Graciously always feeds back on the design.
It's the number one thing I hear from folks is just how easy it is to use,
and to navigate and it's just intuitive, it just makes sense.
I think the team themselves were really
enthusiastic about building this, because actually
it’s going to be a product used by millions of people.
It's gonna be useful to people
and actually it's going to make a big impact in the African markets.
For us that's what we love to do, is to build products that matter
and make an impact.