Great initiative, but to be honest I'm having trouble seeing the upside for the freelancer. Being "underbanked" isn't really a thing anymore with the digitalization of fiat. Most of us do our banking online, and hardly ever visit a brick and mortar bank unless we have to.
Being "underbanked" is not just something intrinsic to an individual. It's more about the relationship between payer and payee, or the lack thereoff. When it's complicated for the payer to pay with reasonable fees and timing the bank account of the payee because (usually) they are in different countries or continents. A huge example of such a market is all contractors (software devs, designers...) working from SE asia, Africa or South America for EU or UK companies.
And if they're underbanked for some other reason, that's likely going to affect whether or not you can be their bank (or open an account on their behalf, as the case may be.)
We do not need to open any account for them, we are not a bank ourselves. There is a light touch KYC above 1000€, but not comparable to banks. I suppose that's where the use of crypto make things easier. As an example we are currently seeing an uptick of freelancers from Pakistan which we have no problem registering on the platform.
If I was to invoice someone who couldn't pay me in bitcoin, and therefor had to accept fiat but wanted bitcoin, I would just accept the fiat and convert it myself. I understand that the middle man doesn't want to be left out, but in previous such circumstances I've been doing that all along and I don't see what benefit the middle man can provide me. Unless there's something else that I'm not picking up on, like tax evasion or some such thing, but there's going to be a banking trail regardless and that would provide risk for you, and not prevent the client from facing the same risk they would incur if that were to be their motivating factor.
Yeah the service is definitely not useful to you if you can easily receive fiat for whoever you invoice and also are comfortable converting yourself.
Target audience is more like everyone who would struggle to get paid in fiat (usually because they leave in a far-away country). In that case Archway makes it as easy as if everyone would be "local" in the same country/banking system. Plus it provides invoices that support clean accounting on both sides, notably for the payee it supports a source of funds of their crypto if ever needed.
Anyway thanks for having a look and the feedback!