Jason Blick on EQIFI’s DeFi products and banking integration

0:02i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have jason blick the chairman of ekify jason welcome to the show once again it's great to see you and i'm excited for this discussion thanks ashton it's always a pleasure i would love to kick off our introduction by getting the viewers up

0:23to speed with a little bit on your background in finance banking and in blockchain and how that led to you co-founding echifi yes thanks so i've been in finance for a long time more than 25 years i took my first financial services company to about 1.2 billion dollars and then i started echi bank in 2015 and we bank clients in over 180 countries around the

0:49world and uh a year and a bit ago we started equify which is the first fully licensed and regulated d5 platform very exciting and yeah i think this is a great segue into new opportunities uh new products uh in an innovative space for eckybank to have a digital bank finally getting into something where you can bring more power back to and uh you know just more opportunities

1:17and i would love for you to explain a little bit more about what is equifi and and why did you create it well you're absolutely right there's been no sensible or specifically exciting innovation in banking for decades most banks use the same technology that's going back 40 years they use cobalt a big data centers and swift itself is now more than 40 years

1:40old so we're not seeing a great deal of innovation in centralized institutions across the board d5 exploded obviously about three years ago and the origins are back to the p2p markets from many many years ago as a global digital bank we really wanted to power an initiative in the d5 space so we started 85 approximately a year ago uh equibank powers the the dd5 platform and 85 has gone out

2:09to to launch four products which are doing extremely well and we couldn't be happier with the launch very exciting and maybe you can talk about some of those uh main products i know your team just launched and you know what were the first things you saw as most important uh to deliver to these customers at ecubank well i think one of the major concerns

2:32has been whether d5 platforms are appropriately regulated whether they're licensed what happens if something goes wrong ashton and that's really limited the industry so at the moment d5 is around 100 billion dollars a year which is obviously completely uh dwarfed by the size of the global banking industry which is over more than 130 trillion dollars

2:56so it was sensible for a banking institution to move into the space by by powering a a platform and we launched as you say on last friday so we have four products we have a fixed rate lending product we have a variable late rate lending product we have a yield aggregator which is obviously very very popular at present and rather unusually we have an interest

3:22rate swap product which is the very first one in d5 and we're going after that 500 trillion dollar interest rate swap uh market so we're doing something very interesting very interesting and yeah the size uh to get in right now at 100 billion compared to as you say 130 trillion uh it is nothing it's like not even 0.1 uh so there's so much room for growth uh

3:50right now and it does look like it's been a successful launch so far so congratulations to that uh and i'm sure your team understands that this is just the beginning yes absolutely what we're doing now is we're building interoperability between the d5 platform and equibank products and services and clients and users are going to be able to have credit cards

4:10bank accounts custody facilities otc in conjunction with those core four products that i just mentioned but interestingly enough we're very much the first and we've vanquished anybody else in the space but to us it's an existential threat defy is an existential threat to existing banks so unless existing banks start to go into this sector or at least

4:32power initiatives in this sector i worry about their long-term viability definitely when they say if you can't beat them join them and i'm sure there's a lot of banks that are afraid to move into the space because they don't want to move their original business models and change and pivot but it seems like equibank is very forward-looking and understands that this is where the

4:53future of finance is going well we were very blessed uh we opened bank in 2015 but from the minute get go we had a completely blank sheet of paper we weren't burdened with that horrible legacy technology so we were able to create a digital bank that not only serves 180 countries around the world but is focused on digital onboarding anywhere in the world digital payments

5:17makes it a lot smoother so that architecture made it a lot easier for us to go in and power a deep fight platform i don't understand how most other banks big banks in particular are going to be able to go into that space not least of which is they simply don't have the compliance structures that are fast enough that are speedy enough and efficient enough to be able to meet the

5:37needs of d5 users so it's an interesting space very hard to get into definitely and that's incredible that uh equibank has grown so quickly and as i understand it not having that legacy infrastructure and the brick and mortars tying you down and having overhead costs allow you to expand rapidly well you're absolutely right i mean it's a complete nightmare for big banks today

6:03before they even wake up in the morning most big banks have 50 percent of their tech budget already allocated just to maintenance so we have all these guys and girls literally in their 60s and 70s programming cobalt in data centers it's a great uh it's a great profession for them but anybody less than that age group just has no experience of cobalt and simply doesn't want to uh so us

6:27along with a couple of other really leading digital banks have been able to use uh more appropriate cloud-based services virtuous etc to enable clients and products in the world twice a day and functionality to platform the safety and security of to something an innovative as d5 great thanks so much jason and now with the four products launched successfully

6:51launched so far i'd love to know looking forward what are the main goals for your team now with the launch under the belt well the most important thing is assets under management aum the more aum you have the better liquidity you have the better product rates you can give and the better rates you can give to more people so that's the principal objective

7:12now but in addition to that is making sure that we're meeting the needs of the community we're onboarding people quickly we're providing loans and facilities and deposits in literally seconds or minutes and we're really giving them all the facilities that they need and concurrently bringing in that traditional money as i've mentioned over the next couple of weeks we'll be

7:31rolling out the new uh ekifi credit card so i believe we are the very first d5 platform in the world to have its own credit card for users and that means that they can spend their uh defy earnings or otherwise um loans facilities wherever they want in more than 180 countries thereafter we'll be rolling out bank accounts for users uh through equibank custody otc

7:55and wealth management and then the end game which will be some way away because we need regulatory approval is to have a single platform for ecubank and dekey5 so clients can seamlessly move between all of our d5 products and all of our banking products so that's where we're going to be and that's the aim for the end of the year wow well that's quite a bit from now

8:19until the end of the year i'm looking forward to that especially the the card you know having an equify card i think that really ties uh in the real world into defy and people are like oh i can actually spend and see my balance on a card so i'm super excited uh for that to launch and i'm curious i was looking into you know the community governance uh of

8:41ekifi and i'm curious as you continue to grow out how focused are you on uh driving uh governance through the community and you know having that decentralized nature uh as it is related to defy uh in the platform as well well banks including equibank are very much centralized organization so many people feel that they are out of touch with their bank their bank doesn't

9:06listen to them doesn't understand them etc we try and do things very differently at equibank but it's still a centralized institution our primary objective in ekify is to truly make it community owned community governed and the communica community will control everything rates new products returns and we love that vision we think it's right and we hope

9:31eventually that more banks will listen to what users in the community want and provide similar structures very cool yeah i think that's a great uh competitive advantage and unique proposition to stand out from traditional banks not just having d5 products but also having that community actually have a say and have a part in the in the uh products as well so

9:55i'm excited to see how that plays out oh thank you ashley thank you for your time today you're very welcome for the viewers that are looking to try out these products right now and also follow along with these updates that you mentioned including the credit card and merging with equibank what's the best way for them to get involved into the community

10:15sure so we have a phenomenal website including uh videos that assist people in understanding what we do in our individual product sets and that's www.eckybank.com and then they'll can also follow our telegram group which is listed there along with our the social media sounds great jason i will leave all the links to ekify and ekibank as well in the description box below all the best

10:39with the continued growth in the d5 sector i'm looking forward to these major updates coming out and let's follow up in the near future thank you ashton