As Travel Rule enforcement deadlines appear left and right, VASPs proactively embed compliance workflows in their day-to-day operations. A wave of Travel Rule compliance consciousness is rippling across the market and within companies, resulting in businesses expanding their operations into multiple jurisdictions. Not only is pre-transaction decision-making now seen as part of the larger compliance and business ecosystem, but the holistic view of the Travel Rule is also gaining ground. To further enable these developments, our product suite and updates focus on enabling much-needed standardization and scalability to the VASP due diligence process and empowering Compliance Officers (COs) with robust data and insights that drive informed decision-making.
In this post, we share our product roadmap for 2023, highlighting our key achievements thus far and our future plans to further support your compliance efforts.
Let's dive in!
Product Vision and Strategy
Our mission has always been to enable safe and trusted crypto transactions. To operationalize this, we’ve created the most comprehensive and user-friendly platform for Compliance Officers to gain a holistic view to make the appropriate pre-transaction decisions in regulated crypto transactions. Every feature we designed is grounded in this mission, aiming to simplify the daily tasks related to compliant crypto transactions.
Let’s take a look back at what we’ve shipped in the first six months of 2023:
- Added five jurisdictions to our platform
Regulatory enforcement is speeding up, and so is our platform. A key trend highlighted in our 2023 State of Travel Rule Compliance Report was that 2023 would be the Year of Travel Rule compliance, an insight proving true. Regulatory enforcement is accelerating, inspiring proactive compliance efforts among VASPs across multiple jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Dubai, Japan, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.
We've added these new jurisdictions to our platform, empowering businesses to adhere to local regulations seamlessly. The plug-and-play functionality automatically applies relevant regulatory requirements to all transactions. Our product team constantly monitors and updates the requirements in case of any changes so Compliance Officers don't have to.
Additionally, we've noticed an uptick in existing customers expanding their Travel Rule capabilities to additional jurisdictions, reflecting their solid commitment to compliance. With multi-entity support, our SafeTransact dashboard facilitates the management of multiple jurisdictions.
- Integrated on Fireblocks platform
Travel Rule compliance and pre-transaction decision-making have been recognized as integral parts of a comprehensive crypto compliance stack. Notabene plays a vital role here, providing trust, standardization, and scalability in the VASP due diligence process. Our Fireblocks partnership exemplifies this, as we recently joined forces to offer the industry’s first fully-integrated solution for processing Travel Rule-compliant transactions for institutional customers. Mutual customers can now seamlessly and automatically perform compliance checks on their transactions through their custody providers, with no additional integration needed.
- 117 companies began their Travel Rule compliance journey using SafeTransact
Navigating the global crypto landscape's complexity requires a deep understanding of the ever-evolving regulations in multiple jurisdictions, strategic planning, and meticulous execution. Each company complies at its own pace—largely dependent upon local regulations or internal risk appetite. Further, implementing a Travel Rule compliance program in a company often involves multiple stakeholders from different departments. Knowing this, we put our heads down to devise a plan to improve our customers' experience along their compliance journey and launched the following features:
- SAFE Implementation phases: This feature provides a guided, phased approach to Travel Rule compliance. Customers securely link their internal systems and practice Travel Rule scenarios before initiating real transactions.
- RoboVASPs: This feature acts as a series of VASPs, automatically responding to send transactions. RoboVASPs provide an automated testing environment for diverse transaction scenarios.
- Enhanced compliance controls: Compliance officers have more control over compliance decisions without tapping into their in-house tech resources. For example, Notabene users can now record reasons for declining crypto transactions based on a comprehensive list of logic defined by compliance experts.
- Added a ‘top 20 counterparties’ view to the dashboard
Notabene customers now have a view of their top 20 counterparties on their dashboard, a feature designed to streamline our customers’ initial due diligence process. After completing the initial integration phase, VASPs can automatically link their blockchain analytics providers to identify and rank top counterparties based on transaction history.
The feature displays a curated list of these counterparties, complete with essential details like jurisdiction, Travel Rule activity, and reachability. This immediate value-add simplifies the due diligence process, helping customers quickly assess counterparty compliance.
- Enhanced real-time counterparty identification
Network Discoverability is a feature designed to enhance the real-time identification of counterparties for in-network VASPs. By utilizing this tool, VASPs can boost their reachability and reduce end-user friction.
The system is set up to auto-identify blockchain addresses for both sides of a transaction, ensuring both speed and accuracy. Importantly, all blockchain addresses are securely hashed. Each address is queried individually, ensuring the confidentiality of the entire list. Furthermore, address sharing is reciprocal; they are only exchanged with counterparties who also share theirs. This streamlined approach empowers Compliance Officers to share swiftly, and access VASP blockchain addresses within the Notabene network, significantly optimizing Travel Rule transactions.
- Compliance officers can now set Travel Rule timings without developers
Compliance officers now have the capability to set specific Travel Rule transaction states, such as 'Sent,' 'Confirmed,' or 'Accepted.' When set, a new event is triggered to their webhook, signaling the appropriate time to initiate the actual blockchain transaction. This enhancement addresses feedback from customers who sought guidance on the optimal timing for the corresponding blockchain transactions during the Travel Rule exchange.
Previously, any change in transaction timing required the involvement of development teams. Now, this feature empowers compliance officers to determine the execution timing of these transactions independently, eliminating the need for developer intervention.
- Self-service API: customers can auto generate their API credentials
Aimed at developers, this tool gives customers the autonomy to auto-generate their API credentials without needing to liaise with Notabene's support team. This accelerates integration processes and facilitates the addition of new jurisdictions.
Once generated, customers can seamlessly integrate these credentials with our Auth0 endpoint to retrieve tokens for API use. The system provides both the client ID and secret, eliminating any preparatory steps. While the responsibility of managing tokens rests with the users, this feature exclusively pertains to the Notabene API. It empowers users to create transactions from the backend, bypassing our UI directly. API credentials are the gateway to obtaining a token, which authenticates users to access our API.
A look ahead to the updates and features coming in the second half of the year:
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