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Half the world's urban population lives on unnamed streets, invisible to the systems most of us take for granted. While we've made remarkable progress in banking the unbanked through mobile...
Half the world's urban population lives on unnamed streets, invisible to the systems most of us take for granted. While we've made remarkable progress in banking the unbanked through mobile technology, we've overlooked a more fundamental barrier to economic inclusion: the lack of addresses.
Billions are excluded from modern systems, not just financially but physically.
According to the World Bank, 850 million people lack official identification, and 1.4 billion remain unbanked, unable to access formal financial services.
But an even greater crisis is often overlooked: more than 3.5 billion people are unaddressed, living without any formal or verifiable location identity.
The e-commerce revolution that transformed commerce in developed nations has hit a wall in emerging markets. That wall isn't primarily payment systems or internet access. It's addresses.
As much as 50% of cities around the world remain poorly addressed. Despite their central locations, delivering to people and businesses in these areas is often problematic or impossible.
This isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a structural barrier to economic development.
Without reliable addressing systems, the infrastructure that powers modern commerce cannot develop. Last-mile delivery becomes a guessing game. Returns become logistical nightmares. Customer service becomes fragmented.
The result? Billions of potential consumers and entrepreneurs remain disconnected from global markets.
The parallels between banking the unbanked and addressing the unaddressed are striking. Both challenges seemed insurmountable until technology offered a leapfrog solution.
Mobile banking allowed billions to skip traditional banking infrastructure. Digital addressing systems are poised to do the same for physical addresses.
In Kolkata, we've already seen this transformation begin. The non-profit group Addressing the Unaddressed added Plus Codes to doorways in dense underserved areas, giving hundreds of thousands of people a functioning address for the first time. This allowed residents to receive mail and open bank accounts, demonstrating how addressing and banking access are fundamentally connected.
Pickspot's core offering digital addresses that live on phones, that move with people, that remain permanent yet flexible, could transform commerce in emerging markets overnight.
For e-commerce to flourish, three elements must exist: payment systems, logistics networks, and addressing infrastructure.
We've made tremendous progress on digital payments. Logistics networks are expanding rapidly. But addressing remains the critical bottleneck.
Without reliable addressing, e-commerce platforms struggle to:
These challenges compound in densely populated urban areas where traditional addressing systems break down completely.
Digital addressing systems can solve these problems without waiting for governments to implement traditional street naming and numbering systems that took decades to develop in Western countries.
The core technology for digital addressing exists today. Systems like Plus Codes and what3words have shown that it is possible to describe and organize physical locations with precision. These were important early innovations that focused on mapping places.
But the real opportunity lies in addressing people. PickSpot is the next evolution of digital infrastructure. Instead of assigning coordinates to buildings or land, we create portable, verifiable digital handles that belong to individuals. These identities are tied to public shared infrastructure — smart lockers that make location-based services universally accessible and reliable.
The barrier has never been a lack of technology. It has been the absence of a coordinated effort to implement it at scale.
Over the next five years, digital addressing will become as essential to e-commerce infrastructure as payment processing. The platforms that adopt person-centered addressing now will unlock access to the markets and communities that traditional systems have left behind. The businesses that move early will be the ones that serve the next billion.
The implications extend far beyond e-commerce. Digital addresses enable:
The transformation will require collaboration between technology providers, logistics companies, e-commerce platforms, and governments.
We envision a world where digital addresses become as portable and personal as mobile phone numbers, moving with individuals throughout their lives while maintaining connections to physical locations.
The economic potential is staggering. Bringing the unaddressed into the formal addressing system could unlock trillions in economic activity by connecting billions of new consumers to global markets.
Just as mobile banking transformed financial inclusion, digital addressing will transform commerce inclusion.
The question isn't whether this transformation will happen, but who will lead it and who will benefit most from the new economic landscape it creates.
We believe addressing the unaddressed may prove to be the most significant economic inclusion opportunity of the next decade.