Nasdaq (NASDAQ:NDAQ) – How Roxe uses blockchain to lower costs and transaction times for cross-border money transfers

Benzinga is hosting a two-day crypto event at New York City’s Pier Sixty, 7-8. December 2022.

Such of Kevin O’Leary and Anthony Scaramucci, as well as executives at DriveWealth, Prime Trust, Synctera and beyond, will talk about controversial topics, perspectives on fintech opportunities and threats, and share insights on how they are monetizing disruptive trends.

Ahead of this, Benzinga will regularly publish articles about those they see as having a great effect. Today’s chat is included Maodong Xuinventor and president of Roxe.io.

The following text was edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: Hello Mr. Xu, nice to meet you. Would you like to start with an introduction?

Maodong Xu: I am a serial entrepreneur and have been in this field for many years.

Looking back, I started entrepreneurship back in 1994 with the supermarket business. I had used funds from friends and family to finance it.

In 1998 I then entered the internet business. In 2006, my company was acquired by Focus Media, a public company in China, for about $30 million.

Later, in 2008, I left Focus Media and started another business called Lmobile. In 2010, that company was acquired by Telstra for $160 million. In the same year, I founded WoWo, which became one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China.

I brought this company to list Nasdaq Inc NDAQ stock exchange in 2015. The company had a market value of 1 billion dollars. Later, in 2011, I founded Galaxy Internet, one of the largest Internet industry groups.

In 2018 I came to the US and founded Apifiny with my son, Haohan Xu. He graduated from Columbia University a few years ago and started the company in his junior year.

I have since moved on and spent most of my time at Roxe, a company also founded by Haohan. Roxe was a sub-product under Affiniy, but in early 2019 it became independent.

Why did the companies split?

Roxe is a company that uses blockchain technology. Apifiny, on the other hand, was a crypto company. Therefore, many Apifiny partners would have concerns about working with Roxe.

Can you talk a little more about what Roxe is and the products and services it offers?

At its core, Roxe is a global instant payment network focused on business-to-business (B2B).

We offer instant cross-border transfer services to global banks and partners. All of these financial institutions, globally, are centralized. Cross-border transfers can take 3 to 5 business days and cost upwards of 5% to 7% of the total transaction.

This means that cross-border money transfers have very low efficiency.

Today, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can buy from Amazon, but it still takes 3 to 5 business days for any of these payments to go through.

So, cross-border money transfers do not conform to the information age. With blockchain technologies, we can support cross-border transfers and do everything on-chain.

This reduces costs and transaction times.

Can you share what some of the biggest partners are?

A majority of Roxe partners include banks, cross-border transfer companies and mobile wallets. Some include Fairexpay, ECSFin, N2Xpress, iPay, Nium, Treviso and Rana Express.

What are some of the biggest challenges the team faced in building Roxe?

The biggest players in the industry include SWIFT and Visa.

By using the Roxe network we can offer an immediate and very affordable service to this business. Our costs are only 5% of what they paid to SWIFT or Visa before. In addition, these banks and cross-border money transfers do not need to pre-fund these transactions.

It is a challenge to communicate the value we can bring, and educate potential stakeholders.

What is the biggest market for Roxe? It’s not China, right?

No. This is because the cross-border money transfer business we have not yet launched in China.

What are some of the biggest barriers to entry into China?

So in terms of technology and business, we have no obstacle to break into China. However, Roxe is a US company regulated by US law. That is why we are very careful in cooperation with Chinese banks.

Looking out into the next year or so, what are some of the biggest things the Roxe team is excited about and worried about?

Our main priority is to launch Roxe One and expand it. This means that we are expanding our scope from working with banks to working with businesses and enterprises this year.

Why SPAC?

We want to make the company more transparent and help us expand and reach more customers.

Any big points that we missed before we started to wrap up the conversation?

The first point is that, unlike many other companies in the market, Roxe does not try to use crypto for payment. We’re trying to make fiat payments better. And Roxe doesn’t just limit its clients to financial institutions, it also builds this network and makes it open to all partners, including global enterprises.

Each partner who joins our network can connect with other parties. If PayPal and Alipay will join this network, so PayPal users will be able to send money to Alipay users.

What does Roxe mean by the way?

R is for real time. O for open platform. X for Exchange. E for everywhere.