Payment company Xfers has partnered with blockchain startup Zilliqa to explore the use of blockchain and smart contracts to bring greater speed, efficiency and transparency to payment solutions for enterprises, the company said on Tuesday.
Xfers, a Singapore-based payment processing gateway offering
credit card processing and Internet banking transfers, will leverage Zilliqa’s smart
contract functionalities to bring “new innovations” to its Xfers’ suite of
enterprise solutions, which include support for payments, disbursements,
regulatory compliance and a built-in digital wallet. Using blockchain
technology, the company said it hopes to drive greater efficiencies in cost,
transparency, and security.
“Our vision at Xfers has always been to create the trusted,
digital financial ecosystem in Southeast Asia,” said Tianwei Liu, CEO and co-founder
of Xfers.
“With a population of over 600 million, the Southeast Asian market remains predominantly unbanked with over 70% of citizens without access to basic financial services.
By partnering with Zilliqa, we hope to provide a cutting-edge solution that grants equal opportunities and cost-saving solutions for digital businesses looking to set-up in the region.”
Founded
in 2014, Xfers provides an online platform that enables users to collect
payments and make payouts automatically. It enables sellers to collect online
payments, developers to integrate embedded checkout and automate their payouts,
and businesses to disburse payouts to their vendors and contractors instantly
through dashboards. The company processed over US$260 million across Singapore
and Indonesia in 2018.
Xfers is a graduate of Y Combinator’s summer 2015 class and
counts amongst its backers
Challenger, Quest Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, as well as
angel investors Eduardo Saverin.
The company boasts a portfolio of clients in the fintech
space that includes the likes of Tunaikita and Julo, two Southeast Asian
peer-to-peer lending platforms, and Payfazz, an agent-based financial platform
in Indonesia.
Blockchain startup Zilliqa was founded in 2016 by the
computing faculty and research team of the National University of Singapore
(NUS). The startup has developed a high-throughput public blockchain platform designed
to scale to thousands of transactions per seconds.
The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding, a
database partitioning technique that divides the network into several smaller
component networks capable of processing transactions in parallel.
Zilliqa aims to rival payment networks Visa and MasterCard, and claims that with a network size of 10,000 nodes, it would be able to match their average transaction rate. To date, the network has been able to process 2,828 transactions per second.