Applicant name: Aquanow
Applicant type: Private Company
Headquarter City: Vancouver
Headquarter Country: Canada
Innovation Name: Aquanow
Innovation Type: Service
Category: Top Service Provider
Status of Innovation: In-market
Innovation Active Since: 09/04/2018
Innovation Description: Aquanow is a leading infrastructure and liquidity provider that powers financial service businesses to succeed in the digital asset economy. From fintech startups to financial institutions, Aquanow facilitates a broad range of business use-cases for digital assets. Traditionally, the movement of capital around the world has been slow and costly. By tapping into the power of digital assets, Aquanow enables an extremely efficient and cost-effective remittance offering for its global client base.
What is your competitive advantage? Aquanow’s suite of APIs makes it seamless for financial service businesses of all kinds to reliably access digital asset workflows in a regulatory compliant way. Our customers rely on us to abstract away the complexity of rapidly changing blockchain technology. By removing this complexity as a barrier, we significantly reduce the risk for businesses considering launching a new product or service in the digital asset economy.
Why is your solution best in class? Aquanow’s full-suite platform facilitates a broad range of digital asset use-cases for financial service businesses. Our clients are able to move capital around the world quicker, cheaper, and more reliably when compared to traditional remittance solutions. Each month, the Aquanow platform facilitates the transaction of billions of dollars in volume.
Name one advantage of your solution versus competitors. As an early mover into the digital asset ecosystem, we have benefited from the growth of our customers and the economies of scale that come along with our position. Internationally, our leadership team collaborates with top-tier firms daily, and this has allowed us to cultivate strong relationships with key decision-makers across an array of financial service businesses. Our digital asset remittance offering is substantially more effective and efficient than traditional remittance use-cases.
Explain your market presence globally and in your strongest market. We currently operate in 30+ countries and transact billions in volume each month for our clients. We remain the market leader in Canada and we have seen tremendous growth throughout Africa, South and Central America, and Asia. This growth has been driven by client demand for the use of digital assets to help facilitate a more efficient remittance product compared to traditional offerings.
What was the inspiration for this innovation? Aquanow was founded in 2018 with the goal of creating the infrastructure needed to power the next generation of financial services. We believe that we are currently in the early stages of establishing an entirely new financial system built upon blockchain and smart contract technology. In order for this transformation to progress, participants entering this marketplace will require reliable and robust infrastructure on which new products and services can be built.
Who can benefit from your innovation most? Although we are a B2B provider, our clients leverage our technology to offer services to both institutional and retail audiences around the world. The key decision-makers that we interact with include executive management teams, product managers, and engineering leaders. Any business looking to provide a faster and more effective way to move capital around the world for its clients can benefit from our digital asset offering.
What are you most proud of about your innovation? Our company strives to not only be the trusted point of access into this frontier market for fintech companies and financial institutions, but also the foundation for reimagining financial services and the next era of the Internet. Providing a solution that enables end-users and historically underserved financial markets to move their capital internationally at a faster rate and lower cost is something we take great pride in.
Why do you think you should win this category? We’re the preferred infrastructure and liquidity platform for businesses that interact with digital assets. In Canada, we are the market leader and we continue to gain share globally. Our early success resulted from an extreme focus on research and development, leveraging the capabilities of our engineering team, and academic research partnerships with top universities like the Aquanow DeFi Lab at the University of British Columbia. What we have built is a cutting-edge platform that unlocks market opportunities and cost savings for our clients.

TEAM MEMBERS

Full Name: Brian Delaney
Role: Principal

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