Identitii Preps APAC Expansion to Grow Payments Data Blockchain

Sydney, Australia-based blockchain technology provider Identitii plans to ramp up staff numbers in its Singapore and Hong Kong offices over the next six months to help the vendor exploit growth opportunities across Asia-Pacific markets.

Identitii CEO Nick Armstrong says the vendor plans to hire 30 more staff—to be mostly based across its Singapore and Hong Kong offices, which together currently house three staff—more than doubling its current total headcount of 25.

Armstrong says he sees opportunities in Asia Pacific being driven by the volume of regulatory challenges—largely a result of the lack of harmonization across jurisdictions, compared to regions with more harmonized regulatory environments, such as Europe. For example, China and Thailand both impose strict controls on how much money can enter and leave their countries.

Identitii’s technology creates an overlay to payment infrastructures that enables banks to collect and exchange additional information with customers or between teams within a bank, leveraging a private blockchain to enable the generation of unique identifiers—which it calls “Identitii Tokens”—comprised of a string of numbers that will be assigned to each specific transaction, enabling the data to be collected, Armstrong says.

The vendor will launch the second version of its platform at the Sibos 2018 conference organized by international payments utility Swift that will be held in Sydney on October 22. The updated version of the platform will include enhanced functionality that enables banks to deploy it to support additional use cases, such as financial crime and compliance, Armstrong says, adding that Identitii is still investigating use cases, but sees future opportunities for expansion around collecting supporting documentation for trade confirmations, corporate actions, and other types of information traditionally sent by email or fax.

For example, the upcoming addition of API integration with third-party applications such as Microsoft Outlook, along with using optical character recognition (OCR) and text search engine ElasticSearch, will enable the platform to search all data elements in any digitized document.

Identitii went public on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on October 17, raising A$11 million ($7.85 million), which it will use to continue investigating more use cases, and to invest in its software engineering function.

Identitii is currently focused on use cases surrounding cross-border payments and corporate treasury and accounts reconciliation. Armstrong says cross-border payments sent over the Swift network are in a format that limits the amount of information that can be sent. “The missing information means that about 8 percent of payments are getting held up for investigations for regulatory reasons, and so on. We estimate that this costs about $50 on average per transaction for banks to investigate and clear those transactions. Using our technology, we enable the additional supporting information to assist in investigations to allow those transactions to be cleared,” he says.

HSBC, one of Identitii’s cornerstone clients, already uses the platform’s corporate treasury capabilities to better reconcile the bank’s payments and accounts, which has been a driver of the vendor’s expansion plans. “This is predominantly why we’re keen to build out our team in Hong Kong—to support HSBC and some of these expanded use cases. We have a pretty active pipeline of banks that actually have taken those use cases beyond the proof of concept or pilot stage,” Armstrong says.