Tokyo FinTech Meetup #19 - Shahaf Bar-Geffen (COTI) & Steven Heilbron (Investec)

For this meetup, Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI, will be joined by Steven Heilbron, a close advisor and investor in COTI.

Steven is the Joint CEO of Cash Connect, an automated cash handling business that he acquired as part of a consortium in 2013. Steven has an extensive background in finance, having previously served as the Global Head of Private Banking and Joint CEO of Investec Bank in London. Steven is a Chartered Accountant (SA) and holds degrees in commerce and accounting from the University of Cape Town.

COTI’s vision is to build a decentralised and scalable payments network to facilitate efficient global commerce. This will set the standard for a next generation payment solution that is trust-driven, instant, cost-effective and supportive of a multi-currency wallet. By reconciling cutting edge distributed ledger technologies with the best of traditional payment solutions, COTI will be poised to spearhead the mass adoption of digital currencies in the mobile era.

To this end, COTI is developing a variety of technologies that will work
in concert to provide consumers and merchants with a vastly improved
payment experience utilising a globally decentralised digital currency,
Currency Of The Internet (COTI), and a comprehensive payment ecosystem characterised by a number of key features:

— Instantaneous remittance that utilises distributed ledger technology
in the form of a DAG (directed acyclic graph) structure.

— A global Trust Scoring Engine, which automatically assesses the
interactions between buyers and sellers over time, assigning each
network participant a unique Trust Score. Trust Scores provide a
numerical representation of the relative value that each participant
contributes to the COTI network and are used to assign network
fees. It also facilitates the decision-making process by users and
merchants and removes the dependence on a single centralised
marketplace for ratings.

— A Mediation System that resolves disputes between transacting
parties and maintains the integrity of the network. A first of
its kind, the system leverages data science, game theory and
an independent network of crowdsourced mediators to resolve
disputes fairly and efficiently — without prompting a substantial
increase in transaction costs.

— Currency exchange integration that provides network participants
with a means of moving seamlessly between currencies — both fiat
and digital — by aggregating liquidity from internal and external
liquidity pools. The exchange is complemented by an automated
market-maker, which maintains fair and orderly markets in a range
of currencies.

— COTI is developing a suite of applications and services that will
provide consumers, merchants and crowdsourced mediators with
seamless connectivity to the COTI network. For consumers, the COTI
wallet and debit card will facilitate the secure storage, transmission,
and exchange of digital and fiat currencies. For merchants, COTI's
processing solutions will facilitate the acceptance of payments in
a variety of fiat and digital currencies while substantially lower
processing fees. For mediators, the dedicated client will enable
mediators to contribute to, and be compensated for, the successful
resolution of transaction disputes.