Connect Financial February Community Update
Welcome to another monthly Community Update, where we can sit around the fireside and chat all things Connect Financial.
It’s been a busy month internally and there have been a number of “interesting” things happening in the crypto community that have caught our attention.
A market going through an upswing is always cause for a few cautious and restrained fist bumps, but our focus remains solely on our approaching launch date.
Regulatory and Compliance
The recent rumblings surrounding the SEC’s treatment of staking has generated many internal discussions. While at the moment we do not believe that there are too many concerns around Connect’s staking product, these are shifting sands that we will be monitoring closely. We’ve designed the core business model to be resilient in the face of a changing regulatory environment.
Our compliance and legal team have also begun finalizing our entry into the EU and UK markets. This phase included properly assessing the requirements for licensing and which country best suits our needs to incorporate.
The team is also working on preparing for our entry into the UAE, which has recently announced large support for cryptocurrency/web3 and fintech companies that support it.
Development & product
Our most recent security audit and penetration testing came up with a couple items that required addressing. This unfortunately cost us about two weeks of time to successfully patch.
These security audits are a combination of requirements of complying with PCI-DSS from our financial partners and hardened transaction authority processes from our insurance providers.
Overall, we have built from the ground up a core digital banking engine that positions us with capacity to compete against larger well known neobanks.
A big part of the difference between Connect and others in the space is our commitment to transparency and responsible management of funds. If you’ve been reading these updates for any length of time this will sound familiar — I’ve been banging this drum for close to two years. The business team has spent a great number of hours defining the very detailed transaction flows and wallet structures to build fully auditable, on-chain omnibus record of all transactions in the system.
We are still aiming to onboard a very small cohort of test users from the community over the next few weeks, progressively rolling out to a broader group over time.
Marketing
If you have been following our socials, you will have seen that we’ve participated in a number of ‘experiments’ including two AMAs with Christo and a You Tube review in order to gauge engagement, questions and themes as we start discussing the product more publicly.
While we are still defining our key influencer/partnerships, you’ll start seeing more activity in the social channels, including an insulated Twitter account where we can discuss the product and market in a more open way than we can on the main corporate account.
Alongside social marketing, Chantel and team have been busy working with our media networks and providers to get the necessary accreditations to advertise Connect. In the crypto space this is no small effort, but we believe that this will open up a larger addressable market and will be worth the investment in time.
Over the next few weeks you will start seeing some changes to the main website as well in order to further refine our key messaging for the credit card, loan and trade products.
Other Launch Preparations
We have temporarily unpublished the majority of the support documents from the support.connect.financial site while they are updated for currency and accuracy. In the meantime, please ask questions in the Discord and Telegram channels.
Finally, the Smart Metals dApp is going through final stages of testing. We expect to launch in the next 60 days… get ready for your gold and silver backed NFTs!
