BANKEX

About BANKEX

BANKEX was established in 2015 by Igor Khmel, a fintech entrepreneur with a background that includes working for McKinsey, Deloitte, and the Citadel hedge fund, as well as holding an MBA from Stanford GSB. His experience founding the Sberbank Innovation Labs in Eastern Europe directly led to the creation of BANKEX, with the vision of providing traditional banks with the technology to adapt to the evolving financial landscape. The firm positioned itself as a Bank-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider, developing a platform to tokenize real-world assets.

The company's core offering was its Proof-of-Asset (PoA) protocol, a standard designed to convert the rights of an asset into a digital token on a blockchain. This process, which the company termed "Securitization 2.0," aimed to solve the problem of illiquidity for non-fungible assets by making them tradable on a global exchange. To be tokenized, an asset was required to generate cash flow, ensuring financial, legal, and technical oversight throughout the process. This model was intended to increase the speed and ease of transactions such as selling, lending, and sharing assets by providing real-time auditing and reducing evaluation costs.

BANKEX operated on a global scale, with a head office in New York, a business development office in Singapore, and an engineering team in Moscow. The startup gained considerable attention in the fintech space, notably being listed among the 50 most promising new fintech startups by Financial IT's Pathfinder rankings. A significant milestone was its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in late 2017, which successfully raised approximately $70.6 million. The firm's business model focused on creating a tokenization ecosystem, providing the technology and services for businesses to digitize and gain liquidity from their assets. In 2019, the team integrated its expertise in KYC, custody, and digital asset processing to create a universal interface simplifying access to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications.