Hello, it’s so good to be here!
Today marks an exciting milestone with the launch of Impel’s financial messaging service and bridge to the R3 Corda platform.
Impel will improve how financial business is conducted by offering high-tech solutions that provide significant progress over traditional means. We are most excited to bring several service offerings to market that use the latest advancements in technology. Specifically, Impel leverages the XDC Network’s blockchain as our foundation and backbone to deliver exceptional solutions to future-facing banks and fintechs.
I have outlined our service offerings and the history of how Impel came to be. Read on to learn how our platform could be a good fit for your business.
Impel’s Service Offerings:
- Financial messaging (ISO 20022 compliant) with optional collateral for instant settlement
- R3 Corda | XDC Network Bridge to allow businesses to have settlement options
What is blockchain? A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers in a way that prevents individual blocks from being altered retroactively.
XDC Network
Founded in 2019 by Ritesh Kakkad and Atul Khekade, the XDC Network (formerly called XinFin Network) is a CoinMarketCap top-100 enterprise-grade, EVM-compatible, hybrid blockchain, equipped with public and private states and interoperable smart contracts. A highly optimized, bespoke fork of Ethereum, the XDC Network reaches consensus through its delegated proof-of-stake (XDPoS) mechanism.
While the consensus mechanism is proof-of-stake—and thus uses virtually no energy—validators must perform a small proof-of-work (PoW) when proposing a new block. This process makes the network highly resistant to spamming while using an extremely low amount of energy.
Impel offers a powerful new way to send ISO 20022 compliant financial messaging over the XDC Network via an API that allows for complex data handling and high security.
XDC Network’s forensics-enabled consensus mechanism is built upon the most advanced Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol and equips the network with outstanding security and performance, greatly conserves resources, and is fully backwards-compatible in terms of APIs.
Additional Advantages of the XDC Network:
Security: All validating nodes are KYC compliant, with built-in forensic monitoring to quickly target bad actors.
Fast Processing: Two-second transaction “block” time.
Scalability: Can handle 2,000+ Transactions-Per-Second.
Environmentally Conscious: Considered a “green” project, its average transaction consumes just 0.0000074 TWh vs 71.12 TWh for Bitcoin. This is like comparing the electricity for one house to that for a large city or small country.
Low Costs: Users only pay about $0.00001 per transaction.
Migration is Easy – Ethereum-based projects can easily migrate over, because of the Ethereum Virtual Machine “EVM” compatibility.
How Impel Came to Be
A startup spinoff out of XinFin Fintech, Impel is led by CEO and founder Troy S. Wood who has been involved with the XDC Network since it was just an idea on a napkin. Wood brings decades of Internet application development experience, as well as a practical business sense for treating customers right by providing quality and dependability, as well as excellent customer service.
Joining Impel’s team of advisors are both the XDC Network’s founders Ritesh Kakkad and Atul Khekade, as well as SWIFT veteran André Casterman.
Casterman spent 24 years at SWIFT, leading various technology innovations in interbank payments, corporate payments, corporate treasury, and trade finance. During that time, he established an institutional partnership between SWIFT and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and created the first digital trade settlement instrument. Currently, in addition to serving as a senior advisor to the XDC Foundation, Casterman chairs the Fintech Committee of the International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA), with a focus on helping banks establish trade finance as an investable asset class through use of data and artificial intelligence technologies. Casterman also serves as CEO of the Trade Finance Distribution Initiative (TFDi).
Financial Messaging
ISO 20022 is a universal financial industry message scheme, a multi part international standard prepared by ISO Technical Committee TC68 Financial Services.
Impel offers a powerful new way to send ISO 20022 compliant financial messaging over the XDC Network via an API that allows for complex data handling and high security. Utilizing a Layer 2 solution, these financial messages can be sent without worrying about data exposure to unauthorized parties. Impel’s platform provides the first cost-effective alternative to legacy financial messaging solutions like SWIFT and SEPA, but with exceptionally lower intermediary costs and improved record-keeping.
The ISO 20022 standard is quickly becoming the global language for financial messaging. However, Impel’s financial messaging solution goes even further by offering an optional real-time instant settlement capability using the XDC Network’s native coin XDC (or XRC-20 tokens) as collateral in the message’s payload. This allows for instant settlement rather than having to wait for traditional central banking system settlement through nostro/vostro accounts.
Impel offers a self-paced ISO 20022 financial message demo that allows anyone to create and send transaction requests over the XDC Network’s mainnet.
Benefits of ISO 20022
Flexibility: ISO 20022 can adapt more easily than current messaging standards, allowing for more responsiveness to changes in the economy, emerging technologies, and innovation.
Harmonization: Over 70 countries have already adopted ISO 20022, so messages will be harmonized with payment systems around the world.
Compliance and regulation: Richer data will make it easier for businesses to detect fraud and help target financial crime.
Resilience: ISO 20022 will be used across many payment systems, improving resilience by allowing re-routing of messages which reduces the impact of outages on users.
Enriched data: More data can be carried, enabling more detailed and better structured reference information.
Competition and innovation: More flexibility means more competition and innovation in the financial sector.
Straight-through processing: Less need for banks to make manual interventions, reducing delays for the end customer.
Analytics: Enriched data will improve analytics, allowing for improved decision making.
R3 Corda | XDC Network Bridge
R3’s platforms are geared towards regulated industries and utilize trust technology and confidential computing to facilitate business interactions between multiple parties. Corda enables digital trust between parties in regulated environments through distributed ledger technology and permissioned peer-to-peer transactions.
A first of its kind, Impel’s R3 Corda bridge enables $XDC (or XRC-20 tokens), the coin native to the XDC Network, to move to and from the public Corda Network, specifically and currently limited to the Cordite CorDapp (Corda Distributed Applications), and to be used as a settlement vehicle inside of the Corda ecosystem, allowing value to move freely between the Corda public network and public blockchain networks like the XDC Network.
With this unique bridging technology, data can be recorded privately on the Corda network, while limited data sets are transferred to the XDC public network, thereby mitigating institutional risk, and turning Corda into a hybrid network. By extension, this shared ledger will connect the XDC token with every other CorDapp on the public Corda Network.
Going Forward
Impel is already engaged with some of the largest global banks and payment companies, as well as smaller financial institutions in emerging markets - our financial messaging platform could become ubiquitous globally within two years.
Financial institutions can now use Impel’s service offerings to strategically transform their businesses and unlock value-added opportunities enabled by the new standards.
Stay ahead of the curve with Impel’s News and Insights as we cover such topics as these:
- XDC Network and blockchain technology
- ISO 20022 financial messaging
- R3 Corda | XDC Network Bridge
- Instant settlement via $XDC or XRC-20 tokens as collateral
Thank you for learning about Impel and our outlook on financial services innovation. Please reach out if you would like more information or want to discuss how we can serve your financial needs.
