The TradFi to Crypto Bridge: A Two-Way Street - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

hello everybody nice to meet you My Name is Kerry I'm from open paid open paid is what we call a banking as a service provider been going for about seven years based out of London we cover pretty much the entire globe in terms of sending receiving funds on behalf of our clients majority of our customers are some of the largest crypto exchanges in the world so I think we're quite well positioned to talk about the traditional Finance bridge and the crypto Bridge so before we start really just a short history of what we say the traditional finance and the crypto relationship over the years obviously 2009 um Bitcoin could be mined or exchanged by peer-to-peer platforms um forums such as Bitcoin talk we fast forward slightly to 2010 of March the first Bitcoin was exchanged for US Dollars via PayPal so that's quite a large Milestone bearing in mind where we've come over the last 12 years forward wind slightly more again to say 2014 that's when we started to see the major adoption of several exchanges appearing and becoming Front Runners in this space and mainly built on a superior user experience and having essential to that is obviously having a convenient on and off ramp ability to be able to get funds in and out of their exchanges onwards again companies such as ourselves open paid have developed our technology and our infrastructure to allow more payments to come in Via different payment methods which is more and more important in today's market today's world so what's holding cryptocurrencies back essentially from even wider adoption this is the major question that I think poses predominantly most of the people in the audience and exhibiting today it's not the crypto ecosystem itself it's Bridging the gulf between the crypto and the Fiat worlds this is where we like to position ourselves you kind of think of it as two worlds but essentially it needs to be a bridge to be able to get traditional Finance traditional fiat currency into crypto and back again to be able to off ramp so it's essentially a way to move our money from the old world the traditional Financial system into the crypto markets and obviously back again if you need proof that there is a problem or an issue kind of exists in this space just ask yourself a simple very simple question what do you think would be easier sending some ethereum to a friend or essentially buying the ethereum in the first place for an exchange it is very difficult receiving customer funds traditional Banks block payments block movements and there are lots of challenges around that we only have to look in the news and I'm sure most of us here are aware um Banks and crypto have had a very volatile relationship together I can speak from the UK where I'm based and where we're based at open paid and I would say well pretty much all of the banks in the UK at some point will either block or essentially delay funds going from a client account to a crypto exchange it's a big problem it creates it creates a lot of friction in the process so obviously the payment methods we know about and the way that we they're currently funded uh via card payment this is the the majority of users will obviously use their card to fund the account the wire transfer is a much cheaper payment method more cost effective foreign exchange to be able to receive funds into the account and then obviously we have now developed particularly across Europe anyway the open banking has been developed which essentially allows the exchange to pull a payment from the client's bank account as opposed to having the customer experience being one where they go on to push the payment from their own bank account to The Exchange and there are alternative payment methods as well off-ramp unfortunately the majority of methods I guess they're open to people are actually by the bank uh transfer to receive money back from The Exchange itself all of these areas will cause friction and and are causing a lot of problems with customers main bank accounts around the world here we can see just uh just an example of a Fiat and off-ramp diagram so you can see the complexities and and the movement of the funds essentially from the user's bank account there are three main options they can either go via their card a card acquirer they have the open banking as I mentioned earlier which is a very nice method very well adopted across Europe the best solution is we we say open pages by the virtual iband solution which essentially is a unique bank account number in the name of the underlying client this allows seamless funds to flow into the user's bank and over to the crypto exchanges master account from there funds can be dispersed pretty much wherever they need to go so building the right Bridge supercharges uh crypto native businesses essentially you know seamless customer onboarding lower operational risk the manual processes that used to exist in typical payment methods have now gone and obviously allows the exchanges our clients to have more of a global reach faster payments arriving into into them from their users it is a two-way street this is what everyone has to remember we need both worlds to coexist otherwise there's going to be a problem so crypto native businesses need the traditional Finance to help drive that adoption the two can't cannot be independent of each other but on the other hand traditional Finance also can learn a lot through the crypto Innovations and a lot of the um the space is moving at rapid pace so the Two Worlds should exist together so as we're seeing it is as I said a two-way street we have leading innovators tether Circle for example uh they've built significant Traction in the stable coin space we're starting to see that traditional businesses are wanting and needing more stable coins there's a payment method it's faster it's cheaper funds can move across the globe and in a more frictionless way for that to happen the majority of the banking that I just discussed earlier would need to be in place the virtual eye band Solutions Master accounts on behalf of the exchanges once set up this allows this seamless transfer of funds to flow from the end user into the exchange and they do you know they do need to coexist together it's a very important role to play between the two so as I just touched on stablecoin use cases for the traditional Finance remittance That's a classic example you know most people would probably use it for that the lower fees involved as I said instant settlement this is key you know that more and more we're finding people want to receive money instantly if possible as opposed to having to wait days to make a swift transfer or receive a local payment it's much wider access and appeal there's traditional payments as I said lower fees increase traceability instant settlement again lending is now coming into that so it can be adopted into that space higher yields there is much larger institutional demand so we're not just seeing it from retail audience it's coming from institutions Venture Capital private Equity there's much more adoption around this space so this bridge between the two worlds only going to become bigger should only become bigger and again standard settlements not nine to five Monday to Friday it needs to be 24 7 every day of the year this is where the the methods are discussed come in because funds can move to an exchange instantly 24 7. very very important so that was short and sweet I hope you uh enjoyed that today and um yeah thank you for listening thank you