The Exciting History of KGO
From 2016 to the launch of the digital currency in March 2021, discover how the KGO token came to be.
KiwiPay Group: A Laotian Success Story
The KiwiGo story starts in 2016, when French internet entrepreneur Gregory Schmidt founded the fintech payment company KiwiPay Group in Hong-Kong and set up in Laos. With a wealth of experience in information technology and computing, Greg created KiwiPay to bring smarter and more inclusive financial services into the Laotian market and worked closely with local banks and authorities.
As a cashless payment solution provider, KiwiPay helped SMEs to digitize their payments by providing them with dynamic and static all-in-one QR code solutions which enabled foreign e-wallet transactions like Alipay, WeChat Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and CyberSource. This allowed thousands of retail shops, hotels, and restaurants in Laos to boost their financial inclusion into the digital economy.
In parallel, the Laos-based fintech introduced its own food-delivery and taxi services: MyDelivery and Vaivai Taxi, thus emerging as the leading company in the Laotian fintech landscape. KiwiPay’s expansion strategy did not go unnoticed and when the Cambodian e-commerce and logistics company Meal Temple Group began contemplating the idea of expanding into Laos in 2019, it became a preferred interlocutor.
Partnership with Meal Temple Group
By 2019, Meal Temple had become Cambodia's leading on-demand food distribution and logistics platform. Founded in 2013 by French e-commerce entrepreneur Maxime Rosburger, the company gradually established itself as the kingdom’s go-to solution, delivering hundreds of meals daily and expanding its services to include online grocery delivery and a ride-hailing app.
As the domestic market started to become more competitive, Meal Temple decided to expand overseas. Laos appeared particularly promising, and Greg and Max eventually met and set up a strategic partnership regarding KiwiPay’s food-delivery unit MyDelivery. Meal Temple’s expertise strengthened the competitiveness of MyDelivery, while KiwiPay ensured a smooth deployment of the former in Laos by making its premises available and allowing the Cambodia-based company to onboard its payment technology.
Very quickly, it became clear to Greg and Max that both companies had a lot to contribute to each other and that their respective expertise were highly complementary. United, KiwiPay and Meal Temple had the potential to unlock massive opportunities and launch in more markets. So, they both agreed to become one.
Super App Idea and Creation of KiwiGo
Early 2021, KiwiPay Group acquired all the assets of Meal Temple Group and moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore to team up with local businesses, central banks, and financial institutions. The fintech reincorporated as KiwiPay Pte Ltd and absorbed the former services of Meal Temple as its core products, which resulted in the creation of a super app for frontier markets: the freshly rebranded KiwiGo super app.
The creation of KiwiGo was the result of almost two years of study and reflection which saw the super app idea take root in Greg's mind. Assimilating Meal Temple and its operations had created a natural expansion bridge for KiwiPay and its technology to launch internationally. The synergies between KiwiPay’s payment technology and Meal Temple’s logistics expertise quickly appeared to be built to make a difference and provide frontier-markets economies with improved access to online services.
As local customers in frontier markets are leapfrogging to a cashless economy, they are looking for convenient, affordable, reliable, fast and efficient financial services. By being socially useful, economically feasible, and technologically sound, the combined DNA of KiwiGo promised to become the ideal vehicle to carry out this mission successfully.
The KGO Token’s Key Role in the KiwiGo Project
In April 2021, KiwiGo introduced the KGO token, to be used as a token for transactions between merchants and customers. The mission of KGO is to create a unified tokenized currency that all users of KiwiPay can transact and store wealth with, regardless of their local currency or regulations.
When it comes to banking and financial inclusion, the challenges faced by populations in these regions are immense. They are often forgotten by the system, left with little to no banking options or forced to pay extortionary high transaction and storage fees. The KGO token aims to alleviate these challenges and seek to provide cheap, convenient, and transparent access to capital to those who desperately need it.
The KGO digital currency thus constitutes the core mechanic of the KiwiGo super app ecosystem, being a key element to bridging the physical economy to the digital economy, to be used by communities that need it the most. Ultra-fast, efficient, safe and with some of the lowest transaction fees, KGO promises to make a significant difference in economic inclusion and change the lives of many around the world.
