CoinGeek Toronto Conference 2019: Kate Hiscox on BSV evolving payments

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The CoinGeek Toronto 2019 scaling conference offered plenty of exciting prospects for Bitcoin SV’s (BSV) future as a data ledger, its approach to regulations and how several new applications will make the onboarding process much easier. When Kate Hiscox, founder and CEO of DRIVE Markets took the stage, she focused on how BSV will evolve the cross border payments space.

DRIVE Markets has been working on a new product called DRIVE Pay, and by leveraging the BSV blockchain, it seeks to evolve the payments industry after centuries of tradition. The problem, as Hiscox described it, isn’t in the SWIFT network, which helps payments cross borders quickly, but rather in the settlement systems that financial institutions have stuck with since the 1800s.

Banks have used the SWIFT network to great success, but when it’s time to settle the payments sent and received, they’ve had to rely on spreadsheets and faxes. That’s where the majority of the delay is created, and where the BSV blockchain can make a huge difference.

DRIVE Pay will be a multi-protocol clearing and settlement network. By using BSV as its settlement layer, and continuing to use the SWIFT network to increase the ease of adoption for banks, it will speed up the clearing and settlement of these cross border payments.

This is a system not too dissimilar from what Ripple has pursued, but with a key difference. Ripple has gained 200 customers by trying to build an alternative to SWIFT, proving there’s a demand for a faster system. However, buying into SWIFT is rather cheap, whereas building an entirely new system to work with Ripple can be expensive and difficult.

“My company, our team come primarily from the capital and forex markets, where we opt to buy solutions versus building our own custom sort of infrastructure,” Hiscox noted. “Many crypto companies, many of the exchanges, for some reason, chose to build their own exchanges versus buying solutions from companies that have got years and years, decades of expertise. And inexperience build results in hacked exchanges, unreliable infrastructure, trade execution lag and really, little to no back office management.”(5:47)

To offer the best solution, DRIVE Markets was looking for the right partner and the right platform to make it happen, and as they decided on their criteria, the choice became obvious. “We needed at team that really spoke enterprise and version control, and could massively scale to meet our demands, we thought DRIVE Pay could be pretty big,” she explained. “We’re also looking for someone that put, really, clients first and ideology second, that really thought about what customers needed. So Bitcoin SV, you know, there’s no I in team, and Bitcoin SV is no exception. The Bitcoin SV team is have decades, decades of experience in finance, marketing, software development.” (6:30)

So through DRIVE Pay, BSV will be used as the transaction ledger for everything that’s happening. Every transaction will be sent and received with BSV, with the customer choosing to keep it or exchange it for a fiat of their choice. As a result, they will have cross border payments in seconds, and have a very easy transition with the SWIFT network still being part of the system. “We’re working with Bitcoin SV to really power the payment networks of today and tomorrow,” (8:39) said Hiscox.