As far as founding principles go, it’s hard to more succinctly state those goals than Yellow Card Chief Executive Officer Chris Maurice outlined in a recent interview on CNBC: “How does a real person with a real problem utilize this technology?” he asked.
Inspired by the story of a Nigerian man who they saw being charged $90 to make a $200 cash transfer to a family member, they got to work immediately. In a 2020 podcast appearance, he said we went home later that night and started thinking, “What would his family in Nigeria do with $200 worth of bitcoin? You know, bitcoin solves the middle of the problem where… whether you're in Los Angeles or Lagos or China or wherever you are in the world, I can send you money.”
For Maurice, a mover and shaker from day one, it was the culmination of a career forged in the hustle and in search of a permanent purpose; it is extremely unlikely that there is another C-Suite executive at any company of note whose first listed job is “Selling Pokemon Cards.” Importantly, it is not there to be cutesy. It’s just the truth, even if, as Maurice says on his LinkedIn profile, he was“10 years too early.”
It was in 2016 that Maurice evolved into a Stage 1 entrepreneur as CEO of Yellow Card, where he has run things now for nearly a decade. Its corporate clients are its bread and butter, many of them being American or European companies with significant client bases in Africa who nonetheless have problems with payments infrastructures.
Maurice is helping them on the ground by leveraging his weight in an industry into which he wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. “When we moved to the continent in 2018, a lot of people thought crypto was a scam,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “The traditional financial system wasn’t built for everyone, and crypto presented an alternative. The challenge was making it accessible.”
And so that is what he has been working toward after year after year, transaction after transaction: accessibility. The company has evolved so far in Stage 1 that the next two years evoke the question of consumers all over the world: What will Stage 2 bring?
