WIZKEY: interview with Marco Pagani
WizKey is building a decentralized finance infrastructure for structured finance transactions such as assignments of credits, securitizations, factoring and the issuance of covered bonds among others. WizKey uses blockchain technology to do so and, more specifically, the public blockchain of Ethereum. CEO and Founder Marco Pagani explains the reasons for this choice: “Ethereum is a global open-source platform for smart contracts. Ethereum is, among public blockchains, very flexible and secure for the number of nodes and developers working on its code”.
The WizKey team is made up of lawyers, people who worked in finance as traders and IT programmers. By combining their multidisciplinary skills together, they are deploying a decentralized network to meet the needs of banks and enterprises.
“In our previous work experience, we noticed many market inefficiencies due to some characteristics of structured finance transactions – says Pagani – First, inconsistencies of databases and uncertainty about the information set of receivables and structured finance transactions. On the other hand, there is no reliable register for tracking receivables while they are being bought and transferred from one side to the other”.
The beta test of the platform started in the second half of April. It has been made available to three banks, a big pharmaceutical company, and an important arranger of financial transactions in Italy. The goal is to receive comments before September/October 2019 in order to fully industrialize the platform in 2020.
Although it started in Italy, this project has a global vision as it is based on a decentralized network which was created to be borderless and allow operators, including banks and enterprises, to operate, regardless of their country of origin. At the moment, WizKey is working with Italian operators, but next year it aims to experiment with foreign partners and, in a third phase, to go beyond the European borders.
In June 2019, WizKey, attracted by the potential for new partnerships and the opportunity to find new industrial partners and ideas, joined Fintech District. Next autumn it will take part in an event organized by the State University of Milan on some legal issues related to the blockchain, then it will reach Malta for the Blockchain Summit and finally Singapore for the Fintech Festival.
If you wish to stay updated about news, events and initiatives of the FINTECH DISTRICT, subscribe to our newsletter HERE