Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder and chairman of TransferWise, will speak at a technology conference in London on Wednesday 12 June 2019.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg via Getty Images
LONDON – Taavet Hinrikus has taken on the financial services industry with an online platform for international money transfers. His next target is the viral pandemic that has been defined for the past twelve months.
The co-founder of TransferWise unveiled a new start-up called Certificate on Wednesday. Hinrikus, co-founded with co-entrepreneurs Jack Kreindler and Liis Narusk, aims to improve the experience of testing for the coronavirus remotely from home.
TransferWise ‘suggested a 10x better product that was cheaper and faster’ than that offered by major banks and overdraft facilities, Hinrikus argued in a CNBC interview on Tuesday.
The founders of TransferWise took the business over the past decade from the start of payments to a $ 5 billion fintech giant. There are rumors that the company will prepare an initial public offering for this year. TransferWise declined to comment on IPO speculation.
“We were looking at the world of medical testing, and it was similarly backward as financial services were,” the Estonian entrepreneur added.
“Where Ceritific comes in, there is a way to be tested in a reliable way, which we think is a ten times better experience, similar to TransferWise,” Hinrikus said.
What is certificate?
Certificate is an app that verifies users’ identities and instructs them to take Covid-19 tests, with trained physicians ready to verify the test result and provide certification. It will only be launched on Wednesday for individuals and businesses in the UK, but will eventually be launched to other countries.
The tests are not sold by Certificate, but from a company called CHHP, which was founded with Kreindler. CHHP says it has been accredited by the UK accreditation body UKAS to host Covid-19 tests.
Certificate’s test provider will initially sell polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, at £ 64 ($ 89) at a time. Customers send the test kits to a laboratory to determine the result and the next day the certification is made available through the app.
Certificate will soon also offer fast antigen tests in packs of 12 costing £ 249. It states that the latter tests will yield a result within 90 minutes. Certificates earn revenue from a fee that customers charge for their test certificate.
Once a user is tested and registers the result in the app, he gets a digital certificate as well as a QR code that contains information about the test result. The idea is that users will eventually be able to use these certificates for leisure or travel abroad.
“Since there is the right test applicable to the use case, you can use it while going to the cinema, to a concert or to a sporting event,” Narusk, CEO of Certificate, said in an interview with CNBC said, adding that her platform is “test diagnostic.”
According to Certificate, the service is ‘affordable’ and ‘democratized’. However, Covid tests are already being offered for free in the UK by the country’s state-funded national health service. Most things are centralized in Britain when it comes to health, with everything from ambulance rides to complicated surgery all paid for by taxes.
Certificate said he did not want to compete with the NHS but ‘complemented their efforts’ and that he would provide all his test data to NHS England. The company hopes its platform can play a role in the UK’s Test to Release scheme for international travel, as well as Test and Trace.
Immunity passports
Hinrikus tried for the first time last year to deal with ways to respond to the pandemic. A team of engineers from TransferWise worked pro bono to develop so-called immunity passports to get people back to work.
The idea was that someone would do an antibody test to show if they had recently contracted the virus and had some immunity. But experts have warned that such certificates are unethical because it is not clear whether antibody tests provide immunity to reinfection, and there are fears that such virtual passages could infringe on people’s privacy.
“It turns out it was a bit of a dead end, because we don’t know much about immunity yet,” Hinrikus said.
The next step for Certificate is to add users’ vaccination status to the app, now that safe and effective coronavirus vaccines are being rolled out around the world. This could pave the way for vaccine passports to prove that people had the vaccine and get them back to work and play.
“Certified testing is something that can play a big role,” Hinrikus said. “It will, of course, need to be integrated with vaccine information and can be used in certain use cases, such as mass gatherings and whatnot, where people who have been vaccinated or tested can go to those.”
However, Kreindler does not like the term ‘immunity passport’, and insists that it should rather be called ‘vaccination certificates’. Regardless of what they are called, large global companies are investigating vaccination to help lift restrictions on public life.
Certificates are entirely self-financed, and Hinrikus says he put in the most money to get the service up and running. Asked if the company would take venture capital financing in the future, the co-founder of TransferWise said it would only do so if it needed ‘additional help’ to expand globally.
As for Hinrikus’ role at TransferWise, the executive said he had been ‘stepping down from day-to-day operations’ for some time, but that he was still the chairman of the company. He says he was also active in investing angels and other initiatives in technology.