The UK’s challenger bank Ziglu revealed the roll out of its p2p (peer-to-peer) payments facility for both cryptos and fiat earlier today. The announcement has come soon after the receipt of two licenses namely, Electronic Money Institution and Fifth Money Laundering Directive (5MLD), from the UK’s FCA last week.
Ziglu was rolled out in June with an objective of offering easy and safe access to any currency. The platform continues to be updated and several features will be included in the future.
Ziglu founder and CEO Mark Hipperson expressed his views about turning into a fully licensed firm facilitating P2P payments, and revealed future plans.
He explained the licensing procedure as difficult and time-consuming, but necessary in gaining a reputation within the domain. Ziglu does not facilitate crypto transfers into and out of the network.
So, there won’t be any issues of being ignorant about the origin of crypto coming into the system. That enabled the firm to convince the 5MLD regulators.
Alternatively, crypto can be purchased within the app and remitted to others via p2p transfer. That avoids complexity in the working of the system, according to Hipperson. He said “although the 5MLD licence that we hold allows us to do all of the same things that a licenced exchange can, and third-party crypto transfers are certainly on the future road-map.”
Currently Ziglu supports Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ether (ETH), with XRP (XRP) being added in September, and then roughly one coin per fortnight after that as requested by customers.
The platform integrates multiple exchanges and when a customer wants to buy cryptocurrency will always search these for the best price. If this happens to be, for instance, a dollar price on Kraken, then Ziglu will convert the customer’s sterling into dollars and make the purchase instantly.
Even fiat payments to and from outside parties is also facilitated.
Hipperson stated “We aren’t a niche crypto institution, but a modern challenger bank. However, we believe that a modern challenger bank needs to enable its customers to deal in cryptocurrencies.”
Back in January, when Ziglu was first introduced, support for multi-fiat currency and a debit card facilitating exchange of crypto to fiat at best market rates were guaranteed. Piloting of debit cards have been completed and scheduled for roll out in September.
Multi-currency support for users will be made available in October, even though the system for currency conversion at the time of purchasing crypto already exists. In addition, crypto retained with Ziglu is completely insured for a maximum sum of £50,000.
“We are one of the only companies in the world which offers a £50,000 insurance policy on crypto held with us which is quite unique.”
