Benzinga is hosting a two-day crypto event at New York City’s Pier Sixty, Dec. 7-8, 2022.
The likes of Kevin O’Leary and Anthony Scaramucci, as well as leaders at DriveWealth, Prime Trust, Synctera, and beyond, will talk about controversial topics, perspectives on opportunities, and threats in fintech, as well as share insight into how they’re monetizing on disruptive trends.
Ahead of this, Benzinga will periodically publish articles on those it sees are making big impacts. Today’s chat is with Maodong Xu, inventor and president of Roxe.io.
The following text was edited for clarity and concision.
Q: Hello Mr. Xu, nice to meet you. Want to kick it off 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 fund that.
In 1998, I then entered the internet industry. 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. That same year, I founded WoWo which became one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China.
I led this company to list on the Nasdaq Inc (NASDAQ:NDAQ) exchange in 2015. The company had a $1 billion market value. Later on, in 2011, I founded Galaxy Internet, one of the largest internet industry groups.
In 2018, I came to the US and co-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’ve since moved on and spent most of my time on Roxe, a company also founded by Haohan. Roxe was a sub-product under Apfiniy but, in early 2019, it became independent.
Why did the companies split up?
Roxe is a company using 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 bit 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 provide instant cross-border remittance services to global banks and partners. All of these financial institutions, globally speaking, are centralized. Cross-border remittances can take 3 to 5 business days and cost upwards of 5% to 7% of the total transaction.
That means the cross-border remittance business is very low in efficiency.
Today, if you are an Amazon Prime member, you may purchase from Amazon, but it still takes 3 to 5 business days for some of those payments to go through.
So, the cross-border remittance industry doesn't match the era of information. With blockchain technologies, we can support cross-border remittance and make everything on-chain.
This lowers cost and transaction times.
Can you share what some of the biggest partners are?
A majority of Roxe partners include banks, cross-border remittance companies, and mobile wallets. Some include Fairexpay, ECSFin, N2Xpress, iPay, Nium, Treviso, and Rana Express.
What are some of the biggest challenges that the team encountered building Roxe?
The biggest players in the industry include SWIFT and Visa.
Using the Roxe network, we can provide an instant and very low-cost service to this business. Our cost is only 5% of whatever they paid to SWIFT or Visa before. Additionally, those banks and the cross-border remittance companies do not have to pre-fund those transactions.
Communicating the value we can bring, and educating potential stakeholders, is a challenge.
What is the largest market for Roxe? It is not China, right?
No. This is because the cross-border remittance business we have yet to launch in China.
What are some of the biggest barriers to entering China?
So in terms of technology and business, we have no barrier to breaking into China. However, Roxe is a U.S. company regulated by U.S. law. That's why we're very cautious working with Chinese banks.
When you’re looking out into the next year or so, what are some of the biggest things the Roxe team is excited and concerned about?
Our major priority is to launch Roxe One and expand this. This means that we extend our scope from working with banks to working with enterprises and companies this year.
Why the SPAC?
We want to make the company more transparent and help us expand and reach more clients.
Any big points that we missed before we start to close our conversation?
The first point is Roxe, unlike a lot of other companies in the market, is not trying to use crypto for payment. We're trying to make fiat payments better. And Roxe does not only limit its clients to financial institutions, it also builds up this network and makes it open to all partners including global enterprises.
Every partner that joins our network can interconnect with other parties. If PayPal and Alipay join this network, then PayPal users will be able to send money to Alipay users.
What does Roxe mean, by the way?
The R is for Real-Time. O for Open Platform. X for Exchange. E for Everywhere.
