SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 7 November
2019 – Southeast
Asia’s leading FinTech platform for digital businesses, Xfers, has launched its
first blockchain-enabled initiative to further the goal of building an open
financial ecosystem to enable financial inclusion in the region. With the
launch of StraitsX, its pilot stablecoin initiative powered by Zilliqa, Xfers
aims to create a frictionless and transparent payments ecosystem for Southeast
Asia.
In January 2019, Xfers obtained the approval for
Widely Accepted Stored Value Facility (WA SVF) from the Monetary Authority of
Singapore (MAS)–the first digital wallet to do so. As the company continues on
its vision of providing last-mile financial
services to the region, it boasts an extensive portfolio of clients including
digital asset firms Binance Singapore, Coinhako and WoWoo Exchange, as well as
merchants serving the underbanked in Indonesia – PayFazz, Porter Indonesia and
Tunai Kita. Today, Xfers partners merchants to process over US$150 million
every month, as they service a total of over 10 million unique active users
every month across Singapore and Indonesia.
Creating
an Open Future of Money
Open banking has unlocked greater value in the
banking and financial services industry, enabling merchants to provide consumer
services such as online savings and payments without having to navigate through
traditional banking touchpoints. As a result, consumers have easier access to
financial products, and are able to participate in a greater range of
activities, such as starting their own business–bringing about financial
inclusion in a more cost- and time-efficient manner.
This is especially so in Southeast Asia, where
access to traditional banking services may sometimes be difficult outside of
urban areas. With over 630 million people calling Southeast Asia home, and a
mobile user penetration rate of over 140 percent, the region’s digital
population makes a promising customer base for digital payments, especially in
communities currently underserved by banks.
With the Asian Development Bank predicting digital
financial solutions to have significant impact on financial inclusion in
Southeast Asia, Xfers is leading the way with the launch of their StraitsX
pilot initiative. Starting with XSGD, a token pegged 1:1 to the Singapore
Dollar, these stablecoins will increase the level of transparency for
transactions, while also reducing friction to accessing financial products.
This initiative will be supported by a number of early members, including
Binance Singapore, Coinhako, Coinut, Sparrow, Tokenize Xchange and WoWoo
Exchange.
“Southeast Asia has a heterogeneous landscape,
and Xfers wants to empower individuals and businesses to access financial
opportunities regardless of their circumstances,” said Tianwei Liu, Co-Founder
and CEO, Xfers. “StraitsX demonstrates our willingness to adopt technology to
propel our vision of building an open banking infrastructure for the region.
With the transparency that blockchain provides, as well as the stablecoins
being price-pegged to local fiat currencies, StraitsX aims to be the common
ledger for digital assets, payments, fund transfers and eCommerce.”
Building
Financial Trust via a Distributed Ledger
Creating an open financial ecosystem
that fosters financial inclusion requires reliable and trusted innovation. To
remove friction and provide greater transparency, Xfers will be leveraging
Zilliqa’s safe-by-design scripting
language Scilla to provide smart contract functionalities.
Built for enterprise use, Zilliqa is
a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform renowned for its use of
sharding as on-chain solution to preserve trust and enable greater scalability. To date, its blockchain is
able to process 2,828 transactions per second. Through this partnership,
Zilliqa’s proprietary smart contract language, Scilla, will be critical to
ensuring the security of the underlying smart contracts of the Xfers
stablecoins. Scilla is amenable to formal verification, thus providing enhanced
security for assets and transactions on the Zilliqa blockchain.
“We are excited for Xfers as they continue to
make inroads into Southeast Asia. Harnessing the features of our enterprise
blockchain, Xfers will be able to process a significant increase in user
transactions more securely at a scale than other present-day industry blockchain
platforms,” said Amrit Kumar, President, Zilliqa. “Spurred on by the promise of
greater financial inclusion, efficiencies and mobility, Zilliqa is proud to
build on our existing partnership with Xfers to deliver on the shared promise
of progress.”
“Industry players recognise our value, and with
us serving over 10 million users every month, we are excited to deliver even
more, especially for the underbanked across Southeast Asia,” continued Liu.
Xfer’s
stablecoin pilot is set to go live in December 2019, and interested parties can
visit http://xfers.com to find out more information and preboard with
StraitsX.
About Xfers
Founded in 2015, Xfers is Southeast Asia’s
leading Fintech platform for digital businesses — aimed at enabling open
banking for Southeast Asia. It boasts a range of last-mile financial rails
including the Xfers Wallet Kit, payments, financing and card issuance. Today,
Xfers partners merchants to process over US$150 million every month, and
service a total of over 10 million unique active users every month across
Singapore and Indonesia. In Singapore, Xfers is the first digital wallet to be
approved by the Monetary
Authority of Singapore as a holder of a Widely
Accepted Stored Value Facility (WASVF). With this, the Xfers
Wallet can is entitled to hold unlimited users’ and merchants’ stored value,
and it joins the ranks of other WASVFs — EZ-Link Card, NETS CashCard, NETS
Flashpay, CapitaVoucher, and AliPay Merchant Services.
For more information, visit: https://www.xfers.com/
About Zilliqa:
Zilliqa
is a high-performance, high-security blockchain that powers next-generation enterprises and
applications. Developed from world-class academic research and helmed by a team
of experienced scientists, engineers, venture creators and leaders in the
financial services, Zilliqa addresses limitations in scalability and security,
enabling real-world usability across a variety of industries, including
finance, digital advertising, and gaming. In January 2019, Zilliqa successfully
launched its mainnet network, making it the first blockchain platform in the
world to successfully utilise sharding technology.
For more information, visit: zilliqa.com.
