Apifiny, a San Francisco-based global value transfer network, today announced the official debut of Roxe, the first settlement network designed to enable instant global clearing and settlement of payments and remittances, traditional assets, and digital assets. Roxe will save financial institutions significant time and costs by using blockchain technology to provide highly reliable, secure and real-time clearing and cross-border settlement across the world.
Today’s international payment settlement systems are too slow and complicated. Since each fiat currency has a unique cross-border payment settlement system, international remittance can only be achieved through multiple steps by agency banks located in different countries. For example, the USD cross-border payment settlement system uses CHIPS, the Euro uses EURO1, the Japanese Yen uses FXYCS, and the Renminbi (RMB) uses CIPS. As a result, most international remittances still take three to five days to clear and settle.
Existing cross-border payment settlement systems are also too costly. It costs an average of $25 to $35 USD for a U.S. bank to make a cross-border remittance through an agency bank, more than 10 times the cost for an average domestic ACH payment (source: McKinsey & Company, 2016). That cost breaks down as follows:
- 34 percent of the remittance cost is for nostro-vostro liquidity (the cost of banks holding accounts with other banks)
- 27 percent is for treasury operations
- 15 percent is for foreign exchange operations
- 13 percent is for compliance
- 11 percent is for miscellaneous other factors
By adopting blockchain solutions, the global banking industry could save as much as $20 billion by 2022, according to the management consulting firm Accenture.
“Roxe’s mission is to create an unprecedented global value network, one that accelerates value transfer on par with how information is instantly transferred over the Internet,” said Haohan Xu, CEO of Apifiny. “As Amazon restructured the U.S. retail industry, the time has arrived for a platform like Roxe to restructure global asset transfers and help the world’s major banks and financial institutions transfer value much faster and more reliably while saving significant costs.”
Today’s global financial system is extremely fragmented, meaning assets cannot be quickly and freely transferred between markets, countries and various settlement systems. More than 200 countries and fiat currencies, tens of thousands of stocks, tens of thousands of banks, hundreds of traditional asset exchanges, hundreds of public blockchains, thousands of digital tokens, and tens of thousands of digital asset exchanges operate in a highly inefficient patchwork of systems.
Roxe aims to solve this value transfer problem by more efficiently connecting the world’s banks, scattered assets, markets, and systems around the world to free asset transfer from the friction built into financial institutions’ accounting systems.
The Roxe settlement network will provide hyper-efficient settlement amongst its member nodes by creating a shared system of books and records on a permissioned blockchain network. Unlike previous approaches that attempted to enable clearing and settlement via the use of one currency, Roxe is designed to transfer and settle many different assets and asset classes. Roxe is currently designed to support USD and several major digital currencies, with a goal of supporting all G20 fiat currencies and all top 50 digital currencies.
Roxe instant global settlement network’s Roxe Chain technology is designed to deliver settlement in seconds, instead of minutes or even days, with each transfer confirmed by a digital proof of ownership. Member nodes from across the globe may execute such settlements without the limitations of local business hours, regional business days, settlement windows, and cutoff times.
The Roxe network is growing rapidly and has activated two supernodes, Mercurity Fintech Holding Inc. (NASDAQ: MFH) and Apifiny Asia Pte. Ltd., on its blockchain, Roxe Chain, to further increase its computational power and drive network value. The network will activate more supernodes over time, making the network even faster and more decentralized, secure and reliable. As more banks, trading markets, and cross-border payment and remittance companies become node members on the Roxe network, the speed, operational and cost-saving benefits for each member will grow via classic network effects.