Mobile Payments Remittance

Florin Awards Asia 2016 Announces Winners of Startup Competition

The Florin Awards, a startup competition by the Global Payment Summit conference, has announced the four winning startups for the year 2016.

This time, there were two Florins to be won in “jury votes” and “community votes” in two categories: Remittance Breakthrough Transfers and Fraud Prevention Innovation Winner.

Merchantrade Asia (Mtrade Asia), one of the largest money services businesses in Malaysia, won the Remittance Breakthrough Transfers award, Community Vote.

Mtrade Asia has been operating e-Remit, an online remittance platform, since 2012, and further provides users with a mobile app for seamless remittance payments through an integration with FPX, an online payment solution that allows real-time debiting of customer’s Internet banking account of multiple banks in Malaysia.

Mtrade Asia focuses on providing a seamless customer journey and is the first in Malaysia to offer straight through online processing and remittance via mobile application.

As of September 2016, Mtrade Asia has served over 31,000 customers.

OKLink won the Remittance Breakthrough Transfers award, Jury Vote. OKLink is a blockchain money transfer network launched in August 2016. The service currently offers payouts in 15 countries at over 100,000+ locations.

OKLink’s sister company also runs OKCoin, a bitcoin exchange platform based in China that serves over one million customers in over 100 countries.

OKLink has raised US$10 million from leading Chinese and Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Ceyuan Ventures, Mantra Capital, VenturesLab and other notable private investors such as Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper.

Merchantrade Asia and OKLink were competing against CoinPip, another blockchain-powered remittance services based in Singapore.

Singaporean startup Grab won the Fraud Prevention Innovation award, Community Vote. Grab is a Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform, serving the Singaporean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysia and Filipino markets.

Grab offers a wide range of services through one mobile app: GrabTaxi, GrabCar, GrabBike, GrabHitch and GrabExpress.

The company has over 400,000 drivers across its network and owns a 95% market share of third-party taxi-hailing apps.

GrapPay is Grab’s native cashless payment solution built within the app. It provides passengers and drivers a more seamless ride experience, removing friction from managing cash transactions.

Grab has developed a risk and fraud detection system that helped reduce the baseline fraud rate to below the industry average. Moreover, GrabPay guarantees payment to drivers by detecting cards with a high potential for declines or chargebacks. It also detects fraudulent user behavior when sensing a higher incidence of suspicious credit cards.

US-based G2 Web Services, a global provider of merchant risk management solutions, including due diligence, compliance and fraud detection, won the Fraud Prevention Innovation award, Jury Vote.

In 2015, the company launched G2 Transaction Laundering Detection, allowing clients to eradicate transaction laundering. The solution uses G2 web crawling and processing technology combined with data science and expert analysts to ensure safe commerce.

G2’s Transaction Laundering Detection solution currently serves a dozen of clients in Asia.

The company has helped detect an unlawful website selling medications without prescription that was using a cosmetic e-commerce retailer to process transactions, another illegal pharmaceutical website in Australia and a drug seller in South Asia which was using a store purporting to sell athletic apparel to process transactions through a shared IP address.

Grab and G2 were competing MerealBiometrics, a company providing a universal, easy to use payment card supporting multiple cards and access applications that doesn’t require a password or a pin.

Created in 2010, the Florin Awards aim at stimulating innovation in the transaction services industry by supporting innovative startups and assisting the promotion of their products and solutions.

Featured image via https://globalpaymentsummit.com/