Welcome to our 5th product cycle update where we’re covering one of the most important concepts of a payments platform like UTRUST — Compliance!

If you’ve been following along, you know that each cycle has a song which represents some of the key challenges we’re experiencing and this cycle is no different. We choose “Eat The Elephant” this time around because compliance is a huge endeavour for global payment platforms and we are tackling it head-on.

The 🐘 in the block(chain)

One of the reasons we launched our product cycle updates, was to improve visibility on what we are currently working on. For this cycle, we have Joana Mota, Compliance Manager at UTRUST, clarifying some of the challenges we are facing in that aspect.

The team is dealing with demanding regulations on various fronts. We’ve gone a long way in identifying key metrics which can help build compliance according to local and international standards. Our biggest hurdles right now are to make sure that we are in line with AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and TF (Terrorist Financing) regulations. These ensure that UTRUST isn’t used for unlawful activities.

On top of all of that, we have to maintain KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements while identifying and mitigating any risks that come our way. At the same time, we have to stay in line with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which mandates protection for customer data and has significant implications on the product. As you can imagine, this is no small task, but one that is key to making a worldwide payment platform successful.

Even though compliance was our biggest focus for this product cycle we also found time to develop some additional key components of the UTRUST system.

A stronger ecosystem and the path to discovery 🍁

We developed our POS (Point of Sale) system, which allows people to pay with UTRUST in physical stores. We still don’t have a cool name for our POS system, so if you want to send us some ideas we’d love to hear them. Also, we began to integrate Ethereum Classic into the UTRUST platform after having internally tested with it.

Meanwhile, we’ve been building two prototypes for the wallet. The first one, related to the cycle name, is KYC. After validating some of our assumptions we are now integrating it into the app. The second one has been mostly community-driven and identified as we saw our beta testers trying to send crypto to each other. We appreciate our community’s thoughts always, and so we are now building a peer to peer prototype for our wallet to iterate on this further.

At UTRUST, we have developed from being just a simple product to building an all-inclusive ecosystem, from the Widget to the Wallet, from the Merchants Dashboard to the POS, we now have several different plugins that will enable us to become the future of online payments.

Our success will be rooted in our ability to converge efforts into integrating with several merchants as this will enable us to then focus on building the remaining parts of the UTRUST ecosystem. This does not mean we will stop working on them, only that our main priority will be integrating with e-commerce platforms.

Being fully compliant with well-established regulatory standards and practices is also one of our top priorities.

As always, we’ll make sure that you’re kept up to date on all advances with the UTRUST platform.

See you next time!