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Everex is a B2B blockchain-powered Financial Technology company providing blockchain solutions to the global financial economy across payments, money transfers, remittances, currency exchange and lending – among which decentralized global credit histories and scoring for individuals and SMEs are being built. Below is our recent interview with Visakha Thongphetsavong, CMO at Everex:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Everex?

A: Everex is a blockchain-powered FinTech company, co-founded in 2015 by CEO Alexi Lane, a former banker from Morgan Stanley with 15years of experience within the capital markets, finance and payments industry, and CTO Alexander Kakunov, with 15years of experience too within the software engineering field. Both of them discovered the blockchain technology a few years ago and decided to deepen their knowledge into what is considered today as a disruptive tech and deploy the technology in order to build a real-world use case – which they actually have successfully accomplished.

What we are actually doing at Everex is to enable fast, costless, secure and transparent cross-border financial transactions, bringing individuals and SMEs, with or without bank accounts, into the new global economy powered by a distributed ledger technology. Currently, the traditional way of sending money abroad is slow, inefficient and costly. Just think about the last time you had to send money to a family member in another country, or make a payment abroad, you wouldn’t say that was the cheapest solution out there. At Everex, we simply work with financial institutions, governments, central banks and corporates in order to embrace seamless payments and innovate the financial landscape, cutting down heavy processes and costs.

In other words, the Blockchain– or distributed ledger technology – provides an entirely new underlying technology to the cross-border money transfers and payment industry, enabling real-time transactions at ultra-low cost, transparent and secure at the same time. The blockchain technology actually eliminates the need of any third-party or central authority for financial transactions, by encrypting and storing transactions in participants’ account ledger, making it almost impossible to tamper.

We are also considered as one of the oldest Blockchain-based companies and being the first of its kind to have successfully executed a cross-border money transfer pilot helping unbanked population with financial inclusion – Everex’s blockchain-based e-wallet pilot between Thailand and Myanmar helped migrant workers in Thailand send money back home and save huge amounts in transaction fees.

Today, our company is one of the first FinTechs to also explore the blockchain technology for the corporate world in close collaboration with Holley Group of China – Everex’s seed investor – where a pilot is on the way for intra-company payments.

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Q: What are the products and solutions that your company is offering currently?

A: Everex offers a white-label solution to any interested parties like banks, central banks, global retailers and manufacturers, multinationals, telecommunication companies, governments, NGOs and many others. The solution is based on the blockchain technology to enable fast, cost-effective and secure cross-border money transfers and payments. In addition, we offer lending solutions too, building decentralized global credit histories and scoring for individuals and SMEs. Furthermore, Everex deploys the blockchain technology at the sovereign level, i.e. using smart contracts to digitize national currencies for central banks. What we do there, is to actually create a stable coin called eFiat which is actually the representation of a national currency on the blockchain, fully pegged by its fiat value (meaning that 1 THB = 1 eTHB).

With our proven currency tokenisation technology, called eFiat (a stable fiat-backed currency token), Everex successfully digitizes currencies, eliminating inherent volatility tied to crypto. eFiat is powered by governed smart contracts on the blockchain and builds a bridge between crypto and fiat currencies which is currently inexistent.

Everex’s suite of products include Ethplorer (which is currently attracting more than 10 million visitors per month) and is the backbone tech of our blockchain-based e-wallet, Everex.cash, a blockchain mobile wallet app that enables instant P2P money transfers and downloadable under Android App for now.

Q: How can Everex help small businesses?

A: Within the current economy, there are many disadvantages faced by small and medium-sized enterprises such as high barriers to entry and high pressure from competition. Typically, financial transactions passing through banks take 1-3 business days in average to be processed, whereas blockchain-based payments are instantly processed. In addition, blockchain-based transactions are highly secure with minimal transaction fees and allows for clear traceability and transparency of the transfers.

With SMEs being a significant source of employment and GDP growth to any economy, Everex believes that financial technology solutions will open up opportunities for SMEs which can be financially more efficient and accessible. The blockchain technology is widely being adopted to send and receive payments. Thus, by providing a blockchain technology solution, any small and medium size enterprises will be able to transfer money directly and securely to the counterparty at very low cost and nearly instantly, allowing SMEs to remain competitive within the global marketplace.

We believe that with Ethereum blockchain-based solutions, like Everex, such transactions can be settled within 30 seconds. Long waits and high cost for fund transfers will soon be a story of the past, putting customer satisfaction firmly back in the hands of businesses.

Q: What is its edge over other blockchain FinTechs with similar specialisations?

A: What differentiates us from other blockchain companies is that the solution we offer is not only designed for mainstream financial services, like money transfers organizations and merchant payments, but also to accelerate financial inclusion to those who do not have access to this latter. We are deploying the technology in three verticals: financial inclusion, financial institutions and corporate world.

Let’s take for instance remittance services. In our opinion, remittance solutions that exist today are outdated. Although it helps people to send money to their families across the globe, it is done predominantly in cash, at great time consumption and cost for the user. The current financial setup doesn’t help users to break existing financial inclusion barriers such as access to credit or enabling cashless payments at ultra-low costs. And this is what we do at Everex. We solve these problems.

In addition, Everex is one of the first companies to offer private payment solutions based on a public blockchain (Ethereum) using smart contracts in order to issue stable e-fiat currencies. Most of the existing blockchain-powered FinTechs focus on a private blockchain, which restricts the access and control mechanism

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Q: What are your plans for the future/ roadmap?

A: Everex was started with a vision to provide individuals and businesses an ideal solution to make real-time payments and cross-border money transfers costless, regardless of the availability of a bank account. Hence Everex will continue deploying the blockchain technology for financial and non-financial institutions. We do have a unique platform that allows us to implement the solution within various industries, on a top down approach, from sovereign entities to corporates. Our offerings also provide a solution for the unbanked and underbanked population, accelerating financial inclusion.

Furthermore, in addition to industries we already have a presence in, we will further expand into new regions and continents that will widely benefit from our cost-effective solution, and explore the corporate route. Everex’s seed investor, Holley Group of China is exploring a blockchain solution with Everex which is one of the first instances of a real world multinational company partnering up with a blockchain solution provider. This is a major breakthrough in the world of payments both intra-company and inter-company and we believe this is where we will make a big difference.

We plan to start with South-East Asia markets which is home to some of the fastest growing economies in the world. We are also headquartered in Singapore with offices in Bangkok, so it makes sense for us too to start in this region before going global. We would ideally like to be the go-to name for Blockchain-powered financial solution for individuals and SMEs across the globe and become the most admired FinTech powerhouse and making an impact to emerging countries’ economy.