Swiss Startup Liquineq Transfers Money Via The Blockchain

Swiss startup Liquineq believes it can disrupt banking by safely and securely processing transactions within seconds using blockchain.

But its aim is not to replace banks. Instead, Liquineq wants to use local banking partners to manage solutions, with local currency and funds held by the partner bank.

“Liquineq allows financial institutions to transition, virtually without risk and capital investment, from a mainframe-based high capital and operational expense business model to an ultra-low cost, pay-as-you-go operating model which is the end goal of Liquineq’s blockchain architecture,” said CEO Moti Birger in a statement.

The firm says it can manage multiple currencies contained in the same wallet, and still comply with anti-money-laundering and “know your customer” regulations while providing advanced security.

“We are doing regulation-compliant end-to-end banking on multi-tier blockchain without disrupting anything as it is today,” said Ari Birger, chief of alliances at Liquineq, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We grow revenue for banks and transition to automated compliance without the need for capital expenditures.”

Customers can set up and fund an account easily with a bank using Liquineq in minutes by downloading the Liquineq mobile wallet and answering a few questions. Debit cards can also be linked to the wallet.

In addition, the company can handle 10,000 transactions per second before it implements sharding, which will speed the process up to 50,000 transactions per second. Birger added that with the service deployed in 200 countries, that will boost the transactions per second to a few million.

“I expect Liquineq AG, with support from their advisors who have vast experience at Visa, PayPal and the Federal Reserve, to drive dramatic changes in the way payments and banking work around the world,” said Liquineq advisor Gordon Werkema, former chief operating officer and director of payment strategy at the Federal Reserve of Chicago, in a statement.