Three years later they met again. It turned out that Horoszczak and his
R&D team had ‘solved the technical prob- lems of moving money online without the need to have a bank account’. Luczak called another friend onboard
from McKinsey, and they formed Billon in December 2012 to convert this technology into business. Putts joined in late 2014 – as investor,
chairman and chief commercial officer. He says: ‘As a former founding CEO of
three banks in Central and Eastern Europe, I knew exactly how to get adoption of finan- cial products.’ With all this history and personnel in
place – the company moved on. And this year has been good so far. In May, Billon had its first live mon-
ey pilot in its test market of Poland. It was during the ‘largest YouTube creators’ con- ference’ which brought nearly 10,000 fans together. And at the event it enabled peo- ple who followed the top gamer on You- Tube to make donations and participate in the opening of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive chests. One month later it won ‘most innovative blockchain solution’ at the Citibank Mobile Challenge EMEA Awards. It’s nice to get recognition and Putts thinks one of the reasons for this victo- ry was because of Billon’s compliance. Its technology integrates with Citibank’s test systems and allows Citibank (and other banks) to use existing anti-money launder- ing (AML) and know your customer (KYC) procedures.
Foundation and empire Putts says 2015 lays the foundation for Billon’s ‘break-out’ year in 2016. This year the company plans to use
Poland as a technology and user testing market to ‘refine’ its propositions. The plan for the next 12-18 months is
in one word, ‘rollout’. Putts says: ‘Our goal is to have a live
multicurrency solution (GBP, EUR, USD), move the headquarters to UK, continue development of the banking partnerships with the focus on UK, and get 500,000 first clients in the social media payments.’
None of this will be easy and Putts sees
two main challenges. There is ‘too much noise in this space’
with so many cryptocurrency companies around and a ‘lot of confusion created by the large amount of publicity focused on bitcoin and Ripple’. He believes the compa- ny is different as the underlying principles and processes allow Billon to be part of a bank’s core banking system. Disruption is a common word these
days, with start-ups aiming for growth as something new and fresh. And to make themselves seem novel, the start-ups usu- ally sell themselves as the disruptors. However, Putts says Billon’s strategy is
to ‘disrupt from within the regulated bank- ing world’. This means that banks ‘must adopt the technology’. Can this be achieved? Well, Billon has recently signed a deal with an unnamed regulated entity who will support the Euro and pound sterling cur- rencies for next year. If 2016 is a ‘break-out’ then Billon could
reap billions and Putts is optimistic about their chances. ‘We have the right solution, which
solved all of the key problems at the right time – both banks and customers are ready for the change and we have the piece of technology which will help to make it happen.’
Antony Peyton © IBS Intelligence 2016
www.ibsintelligence.com 41 The Billion app
spotlight: blockchain
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