CryptoBiz Magazine Technical and Media Advisor Jay Addison with Jordan Kelley is the CEO of Robocoin, the world’s first and leading Bitcoin ATM company with more than 40 branches in key financial markets and cultural hubs across the world. Kelley has presented Robocoin for the U.S. Congress and the Italian Parliament and has been featured in CNN, TIME, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NBC, USA Today, VICE, and Forbes among others. Previously, Kelley graduated from Babson College and began a career in investment banking at Credit Suisse before founding jobbi.com and Handii.
Transcript
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this is jay addison from crypto biz magazine at inside bitcoins in las vegas with jordan kelly ceo of robocoin jordan how you doing doing good doing good jay how are you i'm doing fantastic thank you your company had the world's first bitcoin atm do you feel that you have adequately capitalized on your first mover advantage so i think we've done a pretty good job it's a great question by the way i think we've done a really good job so far i mean right now we're the largest global network uh we have 18 countries 14 currencies 14 languages but really most importantly right what we did and this is this is this truly is this all matters is we focus on our product you know we focused focused focused on getting the user experience to a point where we think it can really be impactful you know not just for our bitcoin enthusiasts and our bitcoin lovers but for the masses for the globe for the people who are who who really stand to benefit and gain the most from bitcoin right the remittance customers and then the underbanked that has been our focus so it's all about simplifying the customer experience fantastic and that's what we've really focused on so we can dive down that in just a little bit but yeah in terms of in terms of just answering your question we've done a great job of expanding the network we have partners globally we are continuing to expand and proliferate as best as possible but again focus has always been back on the product and delivering our customers something phenomenal and that's what we've done with the robocoin wallet fantastic not only was robocoin first to market but you went directly to a two-way atm while most other companies started with one way looking back do you think that that decision cost you market share considering how fast the one-way atms spread around the world due to their cheaper cost absolutely not again focus on the quality of the product again it's all about the quality of the robocoin is so easy to use for sure absolutely i mean that's uh that's that's been has been the number one mantra of the company and i think that you know what when we launched the machine number one it's really cool right yeah the ability to take bitcoin and turn it into cash it is it's a very it's a very it's it's an unlocking experience it's something that bitcoin had never had previously unless you were meeting a guy in a coffee shop with a bag of cash so i think that it really brings a lot of familiarity to bitcoin um but really you know it's uh the machine is sexy and people like it and and i think the customers i mean our customer retention rate is unbelievable so i know i think we've built something that the customers really enjoy and again we're going to continue expanding on top of that and it really you know the two-way machine is perfect because it unlocks remittance but what it also does is it gives our operators a real business right that's what the guys who buy our machine they're real businessmen trying to create a real network and they understand that going with robocoin is the right decision well we definitely love the robocoins i mean there's two of them in vancouver right i send all of my friends down to the robocoin to buy their bitcoins there's one up at a restaurant on the corner of broadway and oak where we go all the time it's a fantastic one up there in fact we actually did a social campaign for that guy just to help him out and we sold out his machine three times in one day how great is that eh i love it i love it you've received a lot of criticism for the security options you added to the atm operator specifically the palm scanner why did you decide to go so far above and beyond the currently accepted standards in the financial industry so the way that the the word the way the current financial industry works is you walk up to a bank teller you hand them your id that bank teller looks at the looks at the picture on the id and looks at your face that bank teller every time you hand him your id is performing a biometric education it's right at the end that's what he does every single time you walk up and by the way it's a pain in the butt having to walk up pull out your id and handing it to a guy so the way that we kind of engineered our enrollment process was to take banking's best practices remove the human teller remove the need for human teller and that's critical and also remove the need to pull out your id every time you want to make a transaction that sucks so instead customer walks up to the machine they enter in their phone number they verify their phone number they then enter the pin and they create a pin they then scan their palm and you know very similar to the way that you would use your iphone when you uh you know kind of enroll your fingerprint yes you you scan it four times to get a good reading from there you scan your government issued id and that's for kyc and aml purposes you know know your customer anti-money laundering purposes and then we take a picture of your face we do a little facial matching we run the name against terrorist watch lists and then boom you have yourself a robocoin account and no longer do you ever have to pull your id out of your pocket you enter your phone you enter your pin you scan your palm that is a three factor authentication and that is the strongest factor and that's the strongest authentication absolutely now going back to the robocoin wallet why this is so cool is customers are storing their bitcoin with us they're trusting us to store their bitcoin i want to make sure that their bitcoin is always secure that nobody's ripping them off right if you you know let's say for example you're at uh you're at a bank of america or whatever it may be you know you scan your you grab your debit card you enter in your pin somebody watches you scan your pin yes okay they could just punch you in the you know punch you right they hit you right on the button knock you out grab your cash or grab your card enter it in enter your pin and your you know and your toast robocoin i mean they can't do a thing they don't have your hand even if they chop your hand off even if they chop your hand off is the coolest part you don't need blood flowing through there so it won't even it won't even register all right so again you know i think i think it's some really cool security i think that having the ability to globally access your money enter your phone your pin and your palm anywhere in the world from hong kong to uh you know to bucharest to vancouver to toronto your money travels with you and it's you know your money's in the palm of your hand it's pretty cool with new companies like bitx offering two-way atms for 5k us dollars how does how does robocoin plan on staying competitive yeah and it's all about the network and it's all about the quality of everything right you know again these guys the vast majority they they took what robocoin built and they cloned it they copied it yeah and then they put it in yeah cheaper enclosures try to make it cheaper and then and then they also use cheaper dispensers and acceptors and we're using top of the line bank grade acceptors and dispensers um and these guys are running shoddy software here's the beautiful part this is what we learned really early scaling this business is tough it's really really difficult because when you are dependent on all of the external bitcoin infrastructure things break things go down bitstamp might go down bitstamp might have you know 24 hours before they're actually sending their bitcoin out how about you know if you're using a blockchain parser the blockchain parser might go down if that happens your customers are screwed they're going to have a terrible experience let's say for example your customer sending bitcoin to some some you know some sketchy wallet that customer might lose their bitcoin ultimately who's whose neck is on the line it's not necessarily the operator although they're the ones engaging with the customer it is the manufacturer of the machine we are the ones getting called bid x is going to be the ones getting called bit access is one getting called those are the ones who actually they are gonna be incurring all those support nightmares and uh you know again this is why we built the robocoin wallet we've centralized all of that experience you know look you can still get out of it it's purely complementary to the entire ecosystem but what it does is it provides our consumers our customers a really consistent but awesome experience it sure is i gotta tell you i love robocoins i really do appreciate it do you have any plans to give kiosk operators the ability to enable their machines to sell all coins like doge we haven't we haven't really dove too deep into altcoins yet um and until we see something that really is gonna like yeah that we think is gonna really benefit what we don't want to do is confuse our consumers right because if if we want to really win the remittance market if we want to hopefully win over the hearts of the underbanked we really need to provide a service that you know that that's consistent and familiar and what we're trying to we're really trying to build on that yeah i can understand that i mean it's you know because we're broadcasting and we're distributing the reuters audience and we have people that are not technically inclined and that kind of stuff the easier that you can make it and i think you hit it right on the nail i mean your machine is so easy uh anybody can use it i mean when we're up in that restaurant there's people coming to that machine non-stop i mean it's exciting i love robocoin other than atm services what else does robocoin offer or plan to offer in the future so you know again last tuesday launched the roblocoin wallet huge huge huge milestone for the company right what it does is provides customers instant access to bitcoin so you take your cash instantly you get bitcoin deposited right into your beautiful fully functional mobile web robocoin.com app right um what also does and this is the best part instant cash access so customer you have bitcoin in your robocoin wallet all you do is you walk up to the machine you enter your phone your palm and your p you open your phone pin and palm it says welcome back jordan you have five bitcoins sitting in your account i can then withdraw two thousand dollars instantly right there's no more tickets there's no more receipts there's no more 10-minute confirmations everything is instant which is beautiful one more part that i love is that i think with another feature that we just did which is called send i think we might have unlocked the remittance capabilities meaning you know to expect to expect me to send bitcoin to my mom or at least italy expect juan to send bitcoin to maria and mexico right juan deposits it you know turns his cash into bitcoin it's very difficult to expect juan to be able to you know for one to be able to trust that marie understands what bitcoin may be or to send it to a private or public address yeah instead walks to the machine converts his cash into bitcoin tap send enters in four hundred dollars enters in maria's phone number maria gets a text instantly in mexico says maria juan just sent you 400 it's sitting in your robocoin account in bitcoin you can either access it on robocoin.com or you can go to the kiosk and cash it out right now and sell it yeah that's fantastic so really what you've done is you've almost created the same scenario as a bank where you're holding the funds of the bitcoins and people can access this instead of all the other atms where you just go you know put your put your coins and get your cash out and put your cash out cash in and get your coins out that's fantastic so how does somebody get a hold of the wallet if they want to download that wallet right now where do they find the wallet yeah so actually we did a limited release we are only releasing the wallet to previous robocoin customers or to customers who have access to a kiosk so it's kind of a kind of a slow but exclusive rollout that we want to really get we want to get our core users really excited about this so right now we have machines available in las vegas and mountain view those are the only two that have the actual software update and we are and we are about to start rolling it out globally over the next couple weeks really exciting i can't wait you got to tell us because we don't really push on that because that is i think it's revolutionary really a certain degree it's huge very big let me ask you the question that we ask everybody at the end of the interview yeah and that is january 1st 2015 what do you think the price of bitcoin's going to be it's a bit of a tricky question and we've got answers all over the board i'm i've been asked this question by somebody else as well today and i haven't even come out i have yet to come up with my answer it's uh it's always one of those ones we're so focused on just getting these machines out there that i hardly even think about the price but this is just a guess i don't think anybody could give us an accurate i mean you don't know um i mean nobody would be bummed out to see a nice run up to 1500 or 2500 that would be fantastic but my bet is that you know by the end of this year and this might be uh you know i think this might be a little bit more of a bearish approach i think we'll probably be sitting around things persist i imagine we're probably sitting around 1200 that's probably i think may settle down around that area but at the same time i i wouldn't be surprised if it's sitting at six so it's very detailed it's uh yeah god knows jordan kelly ceo of robocoin thanks kindly for your time today fantastic interviewing you oh likewise man great thank you pleasure magazine live from meckler media's inside bitcoins conference in las vegas remember to subscribe to crypto biz magazine at cryptobizmag.com follow us on twitter at 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