Cointelegraph has been at Money 20/20 speaking to a huge variety of major names in the cryptocurrency market and beyond.
Increasing awareness of the Bitcoin remittance market has put mounting pressure on extant fiat-based money transmitters to adapt their business models. Western Union has received much negative attention this year due to its corporate reaction to Bitcoin, so Cointelegraph spoke to MoneyGram’s Peter Ohser to see how its competitors view the current market.
While traditional electronic payment businesses should feel threatened by the potential of such an innovation, Peter Ohser believes there are still many challenges that Bitcoin needs to face:
"[Bitcoin] is really not being used for remittances. It's hypothetical today in most worlds for how people are using Bitcoin for true remittances. [...] The frictionless[ness] is the value that Bitcoin brings and obviously there is supposed to be a low-cost structure. But increasingly as you start to scale a business and really look at remittances at scales on a global basis, all of the things that Bitcoin stands for will get complicated because of the structure of having to know your customers and be able to track and live under the regulations that governments are forcing you to live by, [which] start to diminish the benefits that Bitcoin does. The frictionless becomes more frictional and that's where we see the challenges with this model."
However, the executive noted that his company "has been watching Bitcoin from an industry perspective since [its] rise," both monitoring and researching the matter.
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