With the BUILD1x mobile app combined with the BUILDCoin, our goal is to connect construction professionals across trades, projects, and geographical zones to speed up projects, keep reliable team members on projects, deliver real-time payments, and reduce overall costs. The “BUILD” team also sees the impact we can make at the individual trade worker level, and by impacting one person at a time, it will have a domino effect towards benefitting the overall economy.
A major challenge many construction trader workers face is being unbanked or underbanked. According to a 2015 FDIC survey, 9 million households are unbanked, and 24.5 million households are underbanked.“Estimates from the 2015 survey indicate that 7.0 percent of households in the United States were unbanked in 2015. This proportion represents approximately 9.0 million households. An additional 19.9 percent of U.S. households (24.5 million) were underbanked, meaning that the household had a checking or savings account but also obtained financial products and services outside of the banking system.”
With 10 million Americans employed in the construction industry, we can conservatively estimate that a half of 1 percent (500,000) of those are under or unbanked. There is no direct deposit or free way to convert their paper check to usable money. Each time they cash a check, they get charged 2–3% of the checks total. Additionally, most of the cash checking companies do not offer late, or off hours for these services, thus, they need to take time off work.
Let us take a look at Oscar, our fictional framing foreman. He currently works for Mega Framing as an independent contractor and earns $40 per hour. He has worked at Mega Framing for 8 years and is unbanked. Oscar leaves work 1 hour early each week to cash his check. He then pays 2–3% for check cashing. After only 1 year, Oscar is losing over $3500 dollars.
With the BUILDCoin solution, combined with the BUILD1x mobile app, we can eliminate lost wages and needlessly spent money on check cashing through the implementation of peer-to-peer payments. Here is where the MATH gets interesting. If we multiply how much Oscar would gain by not losing time on the job each week and the cost to cash each check, Oscar saves $3702.40 per year. Multiply that by the approximately 500,000 unbanked workers in the construction industry and the number is staggering:
With the BUILD1x peer-to-peer blockchain payment solution, we can add $1.8 billion dollars to the economy by streamlining peer-to-peer payments. If you think $1.8 billion is a lot of saved money, just imagine how much more money will be saved each year by eliminating high-interest loans as well — for more information on the B1x future of construction funding, read about “Guido” the hard money lender.
To be clear, this foresight is using a crystal ball, we make no financial economic promises. We do promise peer-to-peer payments will save money for each and every “Oscar” in the industry. BUILD1x intends to be the pioneer of providing instant peer-to-peer blockchain payments in the construction industry.