Cross Border payments between Nigeria and Europe was made easy by Cowrie Exchange and Tempo in 2020.

Commenting, Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted:  “Stellar Lumens (XLM) through their many anchors will very soon become the proxy representative for major and minor fiat currencies in the global market making things easy for customers in 2021.”

Cowrie Integrated Systems are a financial technology company who are facilitating value added services over electronic payment networks. Cowrie issues NGNT tokens.  The NGNT tokens are pegged to Nigerian Naira.  This permits users to trade and redeem the tokens in the global market.

Tempo is the principal EU anchor for Stellar Blockchain payments.  Being an electronic payment institution, Tempo does the job of ensuring pricing in terms of foreign exchange rates and facilitating agent opportunities at a quicker pace.  They are highly competitive in their local markets by virtue of their commitment to customer service.

Suren Hayriyan, Executive Director at Tempo expressed, “We agreed that we were going to use blockchain technology and specifically this stablecoin only if it would really help Tempo to develop its payments solutions and provide a real benefit to the business and customers. Stellar really met our expectations.”

Cowrie and Tempo knew the potential of blockchain technology and therefore they decided to build their solution on the Stellar Network. For clarity, on Stellar, it is possible to issue digital tokens that are backed 1:1 by actual fiat currency. Cowrie came up with NGNT token, pegged directly to the Nigerian naira, and Tempo came up with EURT. Together, they were able to make a bi-directional NGNT-EURT corridor in a way that customers are able to begin redeeming and trading these tokens right away.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) Anchor Tempo

It is well known that traditional remittance flow methodologies are very slow and cumbersome, thereby making remittance difficult.  The service providers who facilitate money transfer charge high fees in a way to make up for increased operating costs due to technical inefficiencies and the end user of the money eventually loses value due to the high remittance costs.  The end users also suffer because of the unfavorable exchange rates before it can reach the destination.

Tempo has witnessed customers who have been struggling to make international payments.  Tempo is now looking for solutions in a way to work in compliance with stricter global regulations by streamlining operations.  Tempo are focusing on developing a solution to remove the friction from the remittance flow while making things easy, fast, and transparent for their customers to use.

While all these are happening, it is very difficult to exchange currencies, which are traded in a low scale in the international market.  Thus, those who want to exchange such currencies are put in to a tight spot. 

Cowrie Exchange saw this problem with customers who wanted to exchange Nigerian Naira but had no cost-effective way to be doing this.