On September 7th, Ziglu, the United Kingdom-based fintech, announced the launch of their peer-to-peer (P2P) payment service for both cryptocurrency and fiat. Last week, the company had been granted the Fifth Money Laundering Directive (5MLD) license, along with the Electronic Money Institution license by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, and so this announcement was made. Founded in June, Ziglu has a vision of offering people secure and simple access to any currency of their choice. There is continuous development taking place on the platform and a number of additional features are scheduled to be added in the future.
Founder and CEO of Ziglu, Mark Hipperson was asked about his opinion on the company becoming fully licensed, along with P2P payments and their plans for the future. He stated that the licensing procedure had been time-consuming and tough, but was necessary for creating a respectable position of the company in the market. He said that it was the 5MLD regulators who had needed a lot of convincing, but they were reassured by the fact that the service currently doesn’t allow any transfers of cryptocurrency in or out of the ecosystem. Hence, this helped them in avoiding the issue of not knowing where the crypto came from.
Instead, it is possible to use the app to buy a cryptocurrency and can be transferred P2P with the other users. Hipperson said that this was done for keeping things simple, even though having the 5MLD license did give them permission to do a lot of the same things as a licensed exchange. He also said that third-party cryptocurrency transfers were definitely part of the company’s future plans. Currently, Ziglu offers support for Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ether (ETH), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and they will be adding XRP (XRP) in September. After that, they will add one coin every fortnight, as requested by their customers.
Multiple exchanges have been integrated into the platform and when customers want to buy cryptocurrency, it will search for the best price. For instance, if people are searching for a dollar price on Kraken, then the customer’s sterling will be converted into dollars by Ziglu and the purchase will be made instantly. The app is already supporting third-party payments for fiat. When Ziglu’s announcement was first made in January, support for multiple fiat currencies and a debit card converting crypto to fiat had been promised at the best market rates.
Testing has already been done for debit cards and they are scheduled for a launch later in September. As far as multi-currency support is concerned, it is expected to be introduced for users in October. They are already offering the facility of currency conversion when you buy cryptocurrency. In addition, all the cryptocurrency that Ziglu holds has also been fully ensured for up to a value of 50,000 pounds. Ziglu said that they are one of the only companies in the world that are offering a £50,000 insurance policy on the cryptocurrency they hold, which is certainly a unique feature.