Polish Startup Billon Completes Distributed Ledger Payments in the UK

E-money transfer startup Billon has successfully completed a trial of a corporate payment system in cooperation with consumer research firm Conduct Research in the UK, announced March 27.

The trial run involved Conduct Research using Billon’s e-payments technology to transfer funds via mobile phones to 100 participants who were able to transfer the funds to their bank accounts, use them to pay bills, or withdraw cash at over 40,000 Paypoint spots.

“As a small firm, we can’t afford the back office costs of pre-paid cards, and certainly, no one wants to give us their bank account details. Our participants were happy to simply download a free app and get paid instantly. Users maintain their own details and passwords, but we get an electronic audit trail of who is paid,” Conduct Research’s Melo Wallace-Potter said about the trial of Billon’s e-payment system.

As a peer-to-peer e-money payment service provider, Billon uses distributed ledger technology to allow two parties to send fiat currency in digitized form to one another without an intermediary or any cryptocurrency fees attached. The startup was founded in Poland, where its peer-to-peer payment system in already live through cooperation with local Polish bank.

Along with a recent relocation of its headquarters to the UK, Billon is taking part in the Financial Conduct Authority’s FinTech sandbox that allows promising companies and startups to trial their technologies in the market without the threat of regulation inhibiting their developments.

It is Billon’s aim to eliminate the unnecessary use of e-vouchers, pre-paid cards, and other semi-cash payment services by allowing individuals and companies to transfer funds directly via their mobile phones.

“Billon eliminates the cost and friction of pre-paid cards, cheques, and cash – now companies can send instant payouts to users who register in seconds,” said David Putts, Chairman and Managing Director of Expansion & Partnerships at Billon. “With an audit trail secured by distributed ledger, much of the back-office costs of monitoring and reconciling payouts are eliminated. Billon’s system enables banks to reduce operating costs by 90 percent and offer value-added corporate and merchant services,” he added.

Now that Billon has completed a proof of concept for the UK market, the startup intends to scale up its activities for UK SMEs and offer its software to banks on a SaaS basis as a value-adding service for banks’ merchant accounts.