With the world speeding up into the digital era, Payment Asia, the Hong Kong headquartered payment solutions provider, has incorporated digital asset custodial services into its corporate treasury capabilities. The payment service provider announced its latest plan to cater to the growing demand for digital asset financing.
In the fast-paced world of digital assets, quick and efficient means of transferring money can significantly impact the success of a business. Yet clients may face hurdles when they want to convert their assets – consisting primarily of stablecoins, BTC, and NFTs – into a fiat currency.
In an effort to solve the problem, Payment Asia builds a platform that offers clients who want to set up trust account an additional option of digital asset management service. Powered by its affiliated companies, the service includes custodians for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which are the two most common digital assets people hold these days. Then the assets will be linked with corporate credit cards to pay bills in fiat currencies.
The inclusive trust management platform allows people to easily manage their digital assets, stocks, cash, real estate, and even art pieces – all in one place. Clients can review their associated spending allocation, and check assets under management in real time for efficient and transparent budgeting.
Kavi Harilela, Payment Asia Business Director, said:” Traditional finance needs to provide a Web3-friendly environment for asset holders as cryptocurrencies and NFTs became popular these days. Hong Kong, as Asia’s financial center, is stepping up to nurture a better and more regulated environment for Web3 startups. It symbols a greater acceptance from traditional finance to embrace the new era of Web3 finance.”
Now with the help of AI, the onboarding process of the platform is also easy. The full capability of the platform can be accessed via just a customised link, offering users support at every step of trust management. A fully-automated Electronic Know Your Customer (E-KYC) process has been used to onboard clients. It allows clients to verify their identity via a remote, paperless process that not only minimises costs but also reduces bureaucratic delays.
“A reliable bridge is very much needed between the old fiat world and the new crypto world of Web3 – and we can call it Web 2.5,” said Harilela. “We would like to make Web3 investment and asset management easier, using our decades of experience in traditional finance. There is enormous potential in the Web3 industry and we look forward to making positive contributions to the virtual asset ecosystem.”
Singapore and Hong Kong have been reiterating their commitments to growing the Web3 industry. The financial services industry has mostly led the way in adopting some of these digital technologies and assets—at its peak, the daily transaction volume processed on decentralised-finance exchanges exceeded $10 billion. Now the adaptive usage of Web3 technology has come into other sectors such as gaming, carbon markets, and art, among others.
Web3 effectively enables traditional revenue streams to accumulate to the users of a platform, increasing the user value proposition relative to their Web2 equivalents. Regulatory oversight, customer experience, and the underlying technology will all need to further mature for mainstream adoption to occur.
Experts believe that novel and unexplored assets will continue to form, including stablecoins, CBDCs, governance tokens, NFTs, and tokenised real estate, among others, according to a Mckinsey report. Driven by new use cases and expanding latent retail and corporate demand, certain assets could also continue to tokenise. And we may see many assets—including bonds and commodities — both their traditional and tokenised versions can coexist.
As such, retail and institutional investors need to facilitate enough channels for new Web3 assets, and build a compliant ecosystem for both traditional and Web3 finance. There is a need for more infrastructure related to custody and asset servicing, clearing and settlement, tokenisation and issuance, risk and compliance, and wallets and identity. As a payment provider established in Hong Kong in 1999 and keeps evolving, Payment Asia has the edge in traditional finance and it keeps helping Web3 businesses to expand with its decades of experience in different regulatory regimes.
Web3 is still in its early stages of development. But its potential is widely recognised. Companies, whether they are large or small, as well as public and social sectors need to think about responsible ways to push the industry forward.
