Kate Hiscox: Providing institutional financial tools with Bitcoin SV

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Institutional investors and banks will play a key role in driving adoption and finding huge uses for Bitcoin. Kate Hiscox, CEO of DRIVE Markets and DRIVE Pay, is focused on providing services on the Bitcoin SV (BSV) that can bring these groups into the fold. She spoke with our Becky Liggero at the recent CoinGeek Toronto 2019 scaling conference about how she’s achieving that goal.

DRIVE started with DRIVE Markets, a product which Hiscox explained, is attempting to provide all the tools institutional traders have become accustomed to, but for cryptocurrency trading. “DRIVE Markets is really designed to bring traders over from the forex markets to trade crypto,” she said. “Forex traders can make a lot more money trading crypto. But they’re used to certain tools. They use high frequency algos (algorithms) for trading and so on, so DRIVE Markets is built to offer them that experience.”

So far, it looks like it’s been working out, and DRIVE is growing as a result. “I’m very happy to say our volume’s doubled since we opened just last month,” she told Liggero. “Very, very exciting. DRIVE Markets, you’d more liken it to, say, BitMEX versus a Binance, for example.”

Where DRIVE is looking to make a huge difference is by providing an evolved cross border payment system for banks. “DRIVE Pay, we saw an opportunity, something really that Ripple established, and showed to everybody that there’s an opportunity to improve cross border payments through efficient clearing and settlement,” she said. “Ripple is great, but we felt it created some unnecessary bottlenecks by not using existing banking systems, and in particular, SWIFT. SWIFT is used by more than 10,000 banks in 200 countries. They send 30 million messages a day. So all the banking systems speak to it. So DRIVE Pay operates in a very similar model to Ripple, but instead of using our own sort of unique payment messaging system, we’re actually using the same schema as SWIFT.”

As opposed to Ripple, which needs banks to totally adapt to a new system, DRIVE Pay is playing into their strengths. “So that means, for more than 10,000 financial institutions around the globe who want a solution, it would be very easy for them to adopt DRIVE Pay” she explained. “And that’s to say, it’s really for bank wires right now, could take up to 24 hours and more actually to be transmitted cross border, with DRIVE Pay, you’re about to do it in seconds, and again, very easy adoption for clients, because we use the SWIFT network.”

The choice to work with BSV came down to plenty of reasons, and as Hiscox explained, it just made a lot of sense for their needs. “Bitcoin SV have proven they have an enterprise mentality,” Hiscox explained. “They can deal with the kind of scale that we expect DRIVE Pay to deliver. We felt pretty good about their coin as a bridge currency in the same role as XRP is for Ripple. And they’ve just been a tremendous partner.”

Watch Kate Hiscox’s presentation at the CoinGeek Toronto 2019: