I know I can be something of a broken record when it comes to the power of partnership and shared expertise, but a meeting of minds last Thursday looks like proving me right.
The venue was the beer garden at the Sun Inn at Richmond. The outdoor location allowed Colin Digby, Ralph Pecker, Gabriel Ruhan, Tony Winslade, Will Garton-Jones, Keith Richards, Bob Blower and me to bat ideas around for a remarkable couple of hours.
The immediate outcome - apart from finding a shared interest in tanks and vintage aircraft - was a potential plan to bring a new level of accessibility and openness to remittances. By combining the expertise of our sister company, Choice International, with the biz.Clarency platform for compliance, liquidity and payments - and then adding the magic of Paycode's final-mile delivery system - we can achieve results that would be impossible for any of us individually.
And that was just for starters; we laid out outlines to deliver positive identity to unidentifiable people like artisanal miners, making it possible to ensure they get paid as well as receiving support for improvements to their working conditions and quality of life. There's scope to create a holistic mine-to-final-use tracking system that keeps our phones and electric cars supplied while ensuring sustainable practices and ethical working.
Then there was the the idea of creating a standard interface to allow businesses to plug in to an open, democratic partnership engine. That one could be really dangerous.
Most of you have been to so-called networking meetings. Some will have even joined breakfast clubs and other such supposed routes to greatness. And they're pretty much all the same: people come along and try to sell their wares to everybody else. That rarely works, but they come back every month and watch each other's presentations.
This is different. At least some of these ideas will come to fruition. In fact some of them are already underway. Others will crop up at the monthly meetings we're now scheduling. The important point here is that none of them would be possible for any of us individually. I can't wait to see what's coming next.
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