Philippine-based money transfer company Bloom Inc. today announced a partnership with distributed ledger blockchain-powered remittance platform Remiit Project to bring the platform’s capabilities to Southeast Asian markets.

The Philippines is a country with high barriers to financial services because only about three of five people have access to bank accounts. As a provider of money transfers, Bloom has worked at the forefront of delivering underserved consumers the ability to access the global economy by giving the ability to send and receive money safely at lower costs.

“Bloom is a trustworthy company and has never had a problem in the past two-and-a-half years with more than 100,000 remittance transactions to the Philippines,” Remiit Chief Executive Stevie An said. The two companies have agreed to work together on implementing the Remiit platform for Bloom’s operations as well as partnering on marketing and market exploration.

Remiit provides fast and cheap money transfers using blockchain technology to decentralize the means and resolution of transactions. Using its own infrastructure, Remiit also seeks to provide a foundation for the adoption of blockchain technology in the $650 billion remittance and payments market.

Remiit’s blockchain platform has a large number of benefits for money transfers. Blockchain systems bestow an inherent trust for peer-to-peer transfers with cryptographically secured ledgers shared between multiple parties in order to create a tamper-proof record.

This feature makes them extremely useful for financial technologies and has been explored by startups such as Chain Inc. and banking sector startup R3CEV LLC as well as big businesses that include JP Morgan Chase & Co. and IBM Corp.

To make remittance possible, Remiit transacts with value-stable tokens that can be used by money transfer companies to provide payment channels across borders more cheaply and faster than traditional companies and systems. With this partnership, Remiit hopes to build off Bloom’s experience in the Southeast Asian markets — including South Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam — in order to form a bridgehead into those regions.

Bloom will also join Remiit’s early testing partners, who will be piloting the company’s blockchain designed to provide faster, error-free remittances across a simplified, user-friendly platform. “By sharing our long-term vision with Bloom, we will strive to cooperate with each other to become the Eastern Union of Asia by 2020,” An said.

By bringing Bloom on board, Remiit expects to attract more money transfer service providers from around the world to pilot its blockchain platform.

Image: Remiit