As soon as the Covid crisis struck, Railsbank wanted to help individuals and businesses which could not quickly access the money they needed.
But the problem was clear to the team: there was no robust global standard for the disbursement of aid. Disbursing money is often inefficient, costly and not transparent. Current systems can be slow, risky, admin-heavy and lack visibility.
So Railsbank came up with its solution. It's called LightingAid, a unique disbursements platform and it was rapidly built using the Railsbank Banking as a Service platform.
Throughout the process, Railsbank received support and encouragement from many companies in the payments sector, including Visa.
Railsbank´s objective is to build a global industry standard disbursement platform using all the Visa tools, such as the Visa Direct API. It was a unique opportunity to help any Government, NGO or charity to move funds to SMEs and end users in a fast, cost effective and transparent way.
LightningAid can instantly provision a virtual Visa card to a user´s wallet, from where they could use contactless payment or on-line payment right away. In the past, this would have taken days, if not weeks. And this can be followed up with a physical card, ‘lightning’ fast.
What's more, it is a great example of how Railsbank can help get funds to the right accounts, at the right time solving the existing pain-points. It has delivered a large amount of money to businesses and people in need. It also shows how the Railsbank platform can be used to rapidly create any financial use case using its API with 5-lines of code.
LightningAid went from concept to working product within eight days. Actually, it went from idea to concept in 48 hours, a full working virtual card within four days and live in the Apple App store in eight days. What previously would have taken months can be deployed worldwide in days.
Railsbank is hugely proud of what it has achieved.
To find out how LightningAid can help your situation, contact us now.