Investment memo - dberi

Summary

Tourism is the backbone of the Caribbean economy. In The Bahamas, it drives over 50% of GDP. Yet the financial infrastructure serving this economy is broken: tourists overpay on FX, local merchants haemorrhage 3–5% on every card transaction, and cross-border remittances cost 8–10%. The infrastructure failure runs deeper than fees. ATMs across Nassau regularly sit broken for days — locals report hitting two or three branches on a regular weekday and still finding none working. Bank servers go down on Friday evenings, leaving merchants unable to accept cards at peak trading hours. The result: Bahamians are forced to keep emergency cash at home because they cannot rely on the system. Tourists arrive to the same chaos.

dberi is the payments and remittance platform built to fix this, enabling seamless, low-cost payment acceptance for local merchants, drastically reducing cross-border transaction fees, and connecting the tourist dollar directly to the local economy. This is the starting point for a much larger mission: building the foundational financial infrastructure for high-tourism, cash-heavy economies that global payment giants have ignored.

Investment Thesis

The Shape of the Bet

Vision and Scale: dberi's vision is to become the dominant payments infrastructure layer for the Caribbean tourism economy, enabling frictionless transactions between the 35+ million annual tourists and local merchants. This targets a market plagued by high card fees (3–5%), high remittance costs (averaging 8–10%), and limited digital access for small merchants.

The Total Addressable Market (TAM) is substantial but requires grounding. The Caribbean sees over $65 billion in tourism spending annually, with The Bahamas alone seeing ~$4 billion per year. However, the realistic near-term serviceable market is the independent merchant ecosystem: the restaurants, tour operators, craft vendors, and service providers that tourists encounter outside of all-inclusive resorts (whose spend is largely pre-paid via corporate card). A bottoms-up view of the Bahamas opportunity:

Comparable payment platforms in emerging markets M-Pesa, GrabPay, GCash demonstrate the viability of this model. dberi's integrated approach (tourist payments + local merchant acceptance + remittance capabilities) positions it to capture a larger share of wallet than single-purpose solutions. Revenue will be generated from transaction fees, FX spreads, and eventually value-added services like working capital loans to merchants.

What We Need to Believe

For this thesis to hold, three things must prove true:

• • dberi can deliver meaningfully lower costs than incumbents. We assume the platform can achieve transaction costs at least 50% below current credit card and remittance fees through modern payment rails and direct integration. This is crucial to win merchants (who face 3–5% card fees) and tourists (who face unfavourable FX rates and ATM fees). The substantial FX spread in the Caribbean creates a healthy margin opportunity for dberi while offering better rates.
• • The team can acquire and retain both tourists and merchants cost-effectively. Two-sided marketplaces are challenging. We need to believe dberi can cost-effectively reach tourists (via hotel/airport partnerships, pre-travel app downloads) and convince merchants to adopt a new system. The founder's local knowledge is key to initial merchant acquisition. Tourist acquisition benefits from the immediate 'pain point moment' of currency conversion upon arrival.
• • Regulatory and compliance hurdles are manageable. Payment systems touching remittances and FX face heavy scrutiny. We assume dberi can navigate Bahamian Central Bank requirements, AML/KYC regulations, and licensing across Caribbean jurisdictions. The BaaS partnership route provides a licensed operating wrapper while dberi applies for its own Money Services Business (MSB) licence in parallel.

Upside Case

If these beliefs hold, dberi could become the category-defining payment infrastructure for Caribbean tourism. We see dberi:

• • Reaching 10,000+ merchant locations across the Caribbean within 3–5 years (~$50M+ annual revenue opportunity at scale).
• • Processing $500M+ in annual transaction volume at a 1.5% take rate = $7.5M+ annual net revenue.
• • Expanding into adjacent services: B2B supplier payments, merchant lending, and currency hedging.
• • Achieving profitability at scale through strong transaction economics and cross-sell revenue.

The strategic endgame could be acquisition by a regional bank, a global payments player seeking Caribbean coverage, or continued growth as a standalone platform with expansion into other high-tourism, high-friction markets globally.

The Team and Their Right to Win

Ivoine Strachan – Founder & CEO

Right to Win

The founder's primary right to win is local market knowledge, authenticity, and technical leadership. International payment companies have not prioritised the Caribbean due to complexity and perceived scale. Local banks are slow incumbents. This vacuum creates a window for a locally-built solution that can genuinely understand and serve the market — a strategy that is difficult for foreign competitors to replicate quickly.

Unique Insight and Company Edge

Core Insight: Tourism economies have unique payment dynamics that generic solutions don't address

• • Massive FX Spread Exploitation: Both tourists (5–10% markups) and merchants (3–5% card fees) are losing significant value to incumbents. dberi splits this saving, creating a genuine win-win value proposition.
• • 'Closed-Loop' Opportunity: Many Caribbean destinations are semi-closed resort economies. Embedding dberi at key tourist touchpoints upon arrival creates natural network effects and rapid compounding adoption.
• • Local Trust & Regulatory Advantage: A locally-built, compliant solution is more likely to receive favourable treatment from regulators than foreign fintechs, especially if positioned as supporting local economic leakage reduction.

Company Edge

Defensibility

Defensibility will come from: Network Effects (more merchants attract more tourists), Switching Costs (integration into merchant operations), Regulatory Licences (multi-jurisdiction licensing is a significant moat), and Local Brand Trust.

Market & Competitive Landscape

Competitive Landscape

dberi occupies a unique position as the only platform purpose-built for the integrated tourist-merchant payment dynamic in the Caribbean. The honest competitive question is not 'Visa vs. dberi' but why a tourist would not simply use Revolut (near-zero FX fees, already in their pocket) and why a merchant would not wait for Square or SumUp. These are the real threats:

The Revolut risk is real but addressable: dberi's tourist value proposition is not 'a better FX card' but 'a payment method accepted everywhere locally, with integrated merchant access and lower conversion friction.' The moat is on the merchant side, not the tourist side.

Regulatory Pathway

The regulatory landscape requires a candid assessment. While the Bahamas has shown an appetite for financial innovation, the Central Bank's experience with the Sand Dollar CBDC reveals the structural difficulty of building adoption in this market and the specific hurdles dberi must navigate.

The Sand Dollar, launched in October 2020 as the world's first national CBDC, circulates at just 0.39% of physical cash in circulation despite five years of operation. Total transaction throughput over that period reached only $14 million, compared to $1 billion in card payments. The primary barriers were structural: absent bank integration, weak merchant networks, and a voluntary framework that gave commercial banks no incentive to distribute the product. The Central Bank has since acknowledged the failure of voluntary engagement and announced plans to mandate commercial bank distribution by 2026.

This matters for dberi in two ways. First, it confirms the market failure dberi is solving: Bahamians and tourists are digitising payments (internet banking grew 39% in 2024), but not through incumbent channels — creating a clear opening for a better-designed product. Second, it highlights the regulatory pathway dberi must follow carefully:

• • The BaaS route provides a licensed operating wrapper while dberi applies for its own MSB licence in parallel. This is the right strategy, and a BaaS partner should be identified and named during due diligence. Potential candidates operating in the region include CIBC FirstCaribbean and Banco General. Note that PayPal and Stripe do not currently support The Bahamas, which removes two major incumbent threats and strengthens the case for a locally-built solution. The rise of dollar-pegged stablecoins (USDC) also opens an additional rails opportunity for low-cost cross-border settlement that dberi should actively evaluate.
• • The Bahamas has FATF obligations and has historically appeared on international financial watchlists. AML/KYC compliance will be more burdensome than the original memo implied. Any BaaS partner will require robust compliance infrastructure before onboarding.
• • Multi-jurisdiction expansion means re-licensing in each territory. The $300K regulatory allocation should be modelled per-jurisdiction, not treated as a one-time cost.

The broader lesson from the Sand Dollar is that regulatory openness alone does not create adoption. dberi's advantage is that it is solving for a customer pain point with a clear value proposition — lower fees, instant settlement, tourist-facing UX — rather than asking users to adopt infrastructure for its own sake.

Risks and Mitigants

Milestones for Next 12–18 Months (Post-Seed Funding)

Fundraising and Use of Funds ($1.5M Seed)

Conclusion and Recommendation

dberi represents a high-potential opportunity to build category-defining payment infrastructure for the Caribbean tourism economies. The market is large, underserved, and ready for a modern, cost-effective solution.

Key Investment Highlights:

• • Large, Growing Market: $65B+ annual tourism TAM with clear remittance opportunity and a realistic Year 1–2 SOM of $40M–$70M in the Bahamas alone.
• • Clear Value Proposition: Demonstrably better economics (lower fees, instant settlement) than all incumbents, with a win-win structure for both merchants and tourists.
• • Exceptional Founder-Market Fit: Ivoine's local market knowledge, technical capability, and authentic community trust are a significant, non-replicable advantage.
• • Favourable Timing: Post-COVID digital adoption, proven demand for payment alternatives (as evidenced by 39% internet banking growth in 2024), and regulatory openness create the right window.
• • Validated Pain Point: Merchant conversations already underway in Nassau confirm supply-side demand for lower-cost payment acceptance. Community forums corroborate the depth of the problem: locals routinely hit multiple broken ATMs on a single weekday, face card failures on Friday evenings, and are effectively forced back to cash exactly the gap dberi fills.