The money transfer industry runs on black boxes. The rate you see is not the rate the operator pays. The compliance checks are undocumented. The ledger is proprietary. Even the fastest challengers in this market, who meaningfully improved customer-facing UX, didn't open any of that.
We think the whole thing can be built in the open. The ledger is a solved problem (double-entry, per-currency balance invariants, property-tested). The transfer state machine is a solved problem (a finite set of states with declared transitions). KYC and compliance screening can be pluggable adapters. The hard parts of this industry — the licenses, the bank partnerships, the FX relationships — are earned over years, and they do not require the stack to be a secret.
Binta is the stack, in the open, built by someone who is actively going to earn those licenses. Phase 0 ships now: the open-source platform, mock adapters, a live US→NG corridor at alpha. Phases 1 through 4 are a 3-4 year plan to grow out of BaaS and into our own money transmission licenses.
The code is at github.com (link pending open-source announcement). The roadmap is at legal/licensing. The founder is at elliot@willingie.com.