The ultimate onboarding UX with an on-chain bank account

Transcript

everybody can you hear me well yes um all right so let me maybe start uh with a brief introduction about myself um so I'm originally I'm an engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology I studied communication system with the main dominant in I.T security but I did pretty much all my career in finance and mostly as a commodity and FX Trader um why I'm telling you that is that because I started my career on the trade floor and as a trained engineer and engineer by heart you want to demystify that you know very Mystic things you know like finance and what is trading and what are they doing

and that's how you know I started to really start to ask basic questions like what is money why does it burn interest rates um why this interest rate is decided by a central planner the Central Bank instead of the market just like everything else and basically I was kind of frustrated because I've never got any answer back from that yeah I saw that even the superstars they were not asking such questions for them money was just a medium of exchange and that's pretty much it um a few years later I discovered Bitcoin quite early it was a huge slap in my face you know simply because you know for the first time I could see that okay we can transfer value we can exchange value we can have value based on trust and distrust is enforced by Matt and not by

any central body so that was a huge Discovery and slap in my face but then I learned the lesson because I did buy Bitcoins you know and trade Bitcoins and did this and that and then mongox came and they lost it all and that was a huge lesson crypto was invented in the first place in order to set people free crypto was invented for people to be self-custodial yeah Bitcoin and ether and pretty much all the crypto exist in order to set you free it's a tool for I would say a peaceful Revolution you know before Revolution is to be violent you need to drop off heads Etc now you have a tool to opt out from the existing system

and that's actually the beauty of it so what do we do at mobile um right now what we offer we believe is kind of the ultimate on and off-ramp the idea is very simple we want to link your bank account with your wallet address and today the way it works is that every time you want to do that you need to wire us some money and add a small reference this reference help us to root this payment and to know to which wallet we should credit you and what crypto you want to receive on which chain so this is pretty cool it works very

fast actually for super instant in Switzerland and even in the UK you don't need sex anymore you don't need centralized exchange we believe this is a really good thing but we're still missing something still you know we're it's a seamless bridge between fiata and crypto but still we're missing something um you still have to own a bank account with an outdated Institution that probably does not really understand World crypto and that will most likely be more and more painful if you do trade crypto so what I wanted to explain today is the next step

of what we're building right now and the idea here is how can we Bridge those two concepts you know I bands and addresses the goal is exactly that in the end this is the same thing an address is a way for you to root your payments an iban is a way for you to root your payments and indeed that's what we want to achieve so the idea here is that we want to have again what we call a kind of revolute unchain the idea is that you get your Ray-Ban as many as you want and each a band can be attributed to a crypto on a specific chain so let's say you can have a Bitcoin a band you can have a niterion iban on mainnet you can have a stable

coin iban on mainnet or on polygon or on ignosis and that in the end is a knife and under your own name and the whole idea here is that you don't the banks the banking system will not see anymore that you're dealing with crypto because when you're receiving money you're receiving money on an iband with your own name so they do not know in the end what is behind it and then of course your self-custodial so you can link that to any wallet of your own of course we will integrate it in our own wallet because we have a mobile wallet to facilitate the onboarding of customers but through the web you can actually link that to your metamask your treasure your Ledger and

that's pretty much um and you can have even the cold one that maybe you have at a at the safe somewhere or hidden somewhere you can have the hot one on your on your on your mobile phone for example or your meta mask and then you can just transact like that the idea is that you will be able to collect your salary you will be able to make payments and at the end of the day in the field whether you enter an address or an a ban doesn't matter if it's an address your payment is going to be rooted on chain if it's an iban it means that it's going to be redeemed with us and we're going to process the payment on your behalf on the Legacy payment route Swift zipper in Switzerland whatever so this is in a nutshell the the next

step of what we want to do of course it will come with a card but the card is always something to be tricky and here I see like so many crypto cards in the market um if you think of it yet another card yeah there are so many of them and they're not not all of them that convenient so maybe they're cool because they give you like some crypto back Etc but most of the time this crypto back means basically uh a kind of inflation token that they would you know issue all the time so at the end of the day is that really the model that we want that's not what we believe yeah card is a is a is a difficult business it's a very low margin business

extremely low and most of the time you even lose money so it's kind of a lost leader you know it's something that people want maybe for the pride also you know to have you know your brand on the plastic but at the end of the day right now we believe that you're better off using your existing revolut yeah revolut works perfectly it has many many occurrences it works in Prague it works in Paris it works in in London and at the end of the day we say by instance you can instant up a pure your revolute coordinate so at the end you can keep your crypto on your own wallet and whenever you need in one click you load your Revenue card so this is um in a nutshell what we're working on what we've been doing and uh

then that's pretty much it and the idea of this presentation was to keep it short so that we can have more interaction and people could ask questions unfortunately I'm not able to make a demo today as you know when you plan something you should multiply by three the times it takes so this will happen probably uh at the in September end of August or September our team is mostly based in Switzerland but since kovid some of the people decided to move abroad like some to Brazil some to Portugal some to Czech Republic somewhere and it works quite well and here I would like to encourage you

to join the Early Access so that you will be notified as soon as we go live with these new features thank you and please feel free to ask questions [Applause] hello thank you very much for the presentation uh what under what kind of license are you offering this product to be able to create I events for for your clients yeah that's a very good question

um so we are based in Switzerland um we are regulated as a financial intermediary in Switzerland um Switzerland is a kind of different animal than the rest of Europe when it comes to licenses we are allowed to process payments on behalf of clients we are allowed to make third party payments um we are allowed to take custody of assets up until certain very low limit and anyway that's not what we want to do and but when it comes to i-bands in Switzerland if you want to have your direct access to the clearer which is called seek the six intervene clearing

you need to become a so-called fintech license or a banking license the fintech license is also called banking light license um that's not our way right now right now we are partnering within this existing banking institution and we are actually renting those eye bands from them and to store it it will be from Switzerland so ibands will start with ch yeah for Swiss franc and Euro because from Switzerland we are part of the sepa Zone we can clear the same way as friends and and other countries and Europe no USD in this case no yeah and for now

the USD is not going to be with a dedicated iban so we'll continue the the existing setup where the USD is actually a pool iban so it's not under your own name yeah so to start it will be only Euro and Swiss franc and then pound in the second stage and then later on we'll see we actually do maybe this is an alpha but we do have created a sub company in the us because we truly believe that the U.S market needs to be addressed from the US and it cannot be addressed from Switzerland so we are putting everything in place right now so we are we are registered as a money service business over there we have our own money laundering reporting officer in the US so we're pretty much ready to launch that in the us as well okay thank

you last question only for retail clients or you you will also on board the businesses no no the the entire idea is to onboard also businesses and we truly believe and that's something that we've been doing um also since quite some time right now I believe like more than a year um and it was kind of confidential but we are helping companies and especially crypto companies to end bank or to basically Bank them in the sense that they have their treasury in crypto and in stable coins and whenever they want to make payments for to pay their salaries to pay taxes to pay the social benefits of this of the employee then they send us the the they send us stable coins and we make the payments on their

behalf so basically these companies today do not have to have a bank account and even like we help companies in Switzerland to basically incorporate without the bank account so the whole idea is that you can bring so for example an sa company in Switzerland is 100k capital but you do not necessarily need to bring that in Swiss franc you can actually bring that in kind in Bitcoin in later in stable coins and that works and that means that right now you can create your company and you can live with when your company can live without ever ever having to have a bank account and will you sublicense the Ivans for instance for a business wanting to onboard its own customers that's

something we are actually looking uh we haven't decided yet fully okay thank you hi I wonder how do you make money and you've existed for a while are you profitable yet with the way you're doing I've also seen your use you're doing zero fee exchanges with the Euro e and is that the future that you want yeah so we are big Believers in stable coins in general maybe a quick story here

um originally when we started Montbello we had in mind um to issue our own stable coins yeah so we wanted to issue Swiss franc token Euro token pound token Etc and even dollar token why because in Switzerland there is a very clear framework to do so and especially if you're not a bank it's impossible to do it if you're a bank but if you're just a financial intermediary as we are it's very easy to get a bank warranty so basically the bank is granting the amount on the on the bank account and you can issue a token that is freely transferable like freely because that setup already exists in paper in Switzerland it's called the reikashek and that means that you can use the same setup and digitalize it yeah

um why we didn't do it because simply if you create your own stablecoin on day one it's useless there is no Market quoted against it there is no pool in uni swap against it there is no nothing in curve nothing anyway so you have to recreate the holding or incentivize people to do it so and then I met Pascal from Jarvis and maybe you know those guys um and then it was kind of an Enlightenment when we discussed together because oh cool now I mean he actually not having the the the the collateral in the bank account but the collateral is on chain meaning that if the collateral is usdc the pretty much the most liquid and with the biggest deaths in the market uh then that means that in two transactions or maybe two in one you can

swap your Euro for the usdc and then usdc to either or any other coin that you want to trade with um so that's that was really the the step here now the second part of your question are we profitable yes we are we are a small team uh and we've been here for quite some time and we are today uh profitable when it comes to the iband side we haven't fully decided yet onto the business model here because again that's costly um it's costly to process payment it's costly to offer ibands especially if you want to offer as much as the customer wants so maybe we'll have some kind of freemium plan and maybe some more like a more expensive uh monthly monthly fee for the premium users

last question okay I think um do you see this as a path towards or a state where everything is just on chain and like how would that evolve in your mind yeah that's exactly the way we view it I mean um we're a True Believer of tokenization in general we truly believe that I mean we created uh we started our journey by creating something we're kind of proud of which is called the bridge protocol I'm not sure it's a protocol but it's a it's a it's a set of smart contracts for you to issue security tokens yeah and to remain compliant during the entire life

cycle we were pioneering in Switzerland we were the first company to incorporate our shares into token and to make it legally recognize one thing so it sounds easy today but at that time there were a lot of um you know people trying to mimic shares so they were doing some kind of profit sharing and some consultative voting rights and this and that but it was not legally speaking shares it was a kind of vulture for shares or something like that what we did at the item was really to go one step further and make it recognize by law meaning that your token holder equal shareholder as such protected by Switzerland and in the future we truly believe that even Banks could have their entire balance sheets on chain in real time yeah and that's why we created it because the bank balance sheet is very

easy and it's on one side you have the liabilities the deposit of the clients what the Bank owes to the clients on the other side you have the asset and most of the time is pretty much mortgages yeah so all that can be modalized in the form of smart contract that's very easy if you think of it a mortgage um today is a kind of a liquid asset for the bank yeah so of course BNP paribac can sell the mortgage to associate engineer of course they can they don't do it because they won't sell a single mortgage they will package you know a setback Securities mortgage-backed Securities you know thousands of loans all together in order to limit the cost of the unit of each and every underlying yeah but you could do the same on chain you can have every your mortgage can be

just a smart contract at the end of the day instead of paying back to an abandon you would pay back to an address and the issuer can sell it to another bank you will not change the AI by new pay you continue or the the address to which you pay you will continue paying to the same address but the owner can be different and because is represented by tokens it can be owned collectively by everyone here or the crowd or anyone so we're True Believers in that and we truly believe that the way forward is your bank account that you own where you own your money where you are your own Banker where you're self-custodial and where no one else has access to your money and of course we we need to bridge that Gap you know no one else has access to your money can be kind of scary for kind of

some people so of course we need to come up at some point with some form of backup solution of course it creates some you know stress in the community whereas we saw with The Ledger case it creates some stress whenever you add backup solution then it means somehow oh there's a possible back door there so we need to pay attention on how but yes that's also the the next step for that but within your own wallet with your wallet should become your bank account your wallet should be linked with ibands should be linked with a Securities account in the sense that you have your own security tokens and everything can be actually tokenized in all the Securities and everything that you traditionally Buy and Hold today okay thank you and thank you all

thank you very much foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause]