service which enables people to support their families, but do it for free?’”
Aleles says he plans to expand Quippi globally, but targeted Mexico first because annual money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico total almost $23 billion a year. “There is more money sent from the U.S. to Mexico than anywhere else on the globe,” he says. While he spent his career mostly in Silicon Valley and Latin America, the 43-year-old CEO says he moved to San Diego to start Quippi because “doing business in Mexico is far easier here.”
Quippi’s approach is simple and low-tech, but potentially disruptive to the money transfer service industry if Aleles can line up enough partners on both sides of the border. Quippi cards now can be redeemed at Chedraui, one of Mexico’s largest supermarket chains (which also sells clothes and non-perishable items), and Coppel, a Mexican department store chain.
The United States represents a bigger challenge. Quippi has partnerships with ePay, a global processor of electronic payments operated by Leawood, KS-based Euronet Worldwide, and PayNearMe, a cash transaction network based in Mountain View, CA. Such partnerships enable Quippi’s “unbanked” customers to buy their PIN code online and pay for it with cash at thousands of 7-Eleven or ACE Cash Express stores.
More work remains to extend Quippi’s availability. As Aleles puts it, “We’re always working on our distribution relationships and new partners.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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