These entrepreneurs will leave Bay Area, return to Singapore to simplify C2C payments

Payments startups are coming out of the woodwork these days. As they seek to claim a place in the landscape crystallizing out of the volcanic material that is fintech, distinct formations are slowly starting to appear. Some companies want to upend the current system of payments by offering complete alternatives to existing banks. Some seek to provide solutions for the unbanked. And some are looking to streamline certain everyday transactions by taking advantage of existing infrastructure.

Singapore-based Xfers is a part of the latter group. The startup enables C2C payments, aiming mainly at peer-to-peer transactions. These are usually buyers and sellers who use marketplaces like Carousell and Taobao or even social networks like Facebook and Instagram. For these users, payment options are usually limited to bank transfers. No one in their right mind would send their credit card information through a Facebook message (hopefully!), and cash is only an option when the buyer and the seller meet up… and that opens a whole different can of worms.

To the Bay Area and back

Xfers founders Victor Liew, Wenbin Tay, and Tianwei Liu wanted to tackle this area after experiencing first hand the difficulties of such transactions. The two NUS (National University of Singapore) graduates were working in Silicon Valley, at Quora and Amazon. Part of a large community of Singaporean engineers working in California’s Bay Area, they were frequently asked by friends back home for items that were easier to find in the US.

(From L to R:) Xfers founders Tianwei Liu and Victor Liew

But when payment time came along, there would be all sorts of problems. They’d have to chase people for payment, relay their bank account information, manually log in to their account every time to see if the payment came through, and manually keep track of who sent them what.

Like many a startup, Xfers was born after someone said, “There has to be a better way!”

Similar to their engineer friends, the duo often got together in their free time to code and hack – and play [Valve’s multiplayer PC game] Dota. “We’re a bunch of nerds anyway, so we hang out and do the same things all the time,” Liu quips. Xfers grew out of some coding sessions like that.

“Initially we decided on an API for banks, to sort of automate [the payment] process,” Liu tells Tech in Asia. “We got it done over a few weekends, and then we put it out, and it was pretty successful. A lot of our friends could use it easily – I just had to create a page and then they would just pay me and I would get notified.”

The company was founded in October 2014, and its product was initially an API for online merchants. “[Through it] we’re able to detect any bank transfer to our account within two minutes and then we integrate with shopping carts via API, to update inventory, to inform the merchants of the purchases made,” Liu says. “[It’s] pretty similar to what PayPal and Stripe do.” The company only works with bank transfers, and charges a flat fee of 45 cents for merchants to use its API.

Click to pay

But since Xfers began offering its services, the founders realized that their product could be ideal for peer-to-peer marketplaces such as Carousell, or people selling things through blogs and social networks. That’s why they added a new feature to their offering called Paylink, which is free to use.

Using Paylink, a seller can create a product listing, set a product picture and inventory, and generate a purchase link, which can be posted on the seller’s page. The buyer can then use that link as a check out button, regardless of where it is placed. Xfers processes the payment through its system and notifies the seller, and even holds on to the payment for a limited time, giving the buyer the opportunity to cry foul if they haven’t heard back from the seller.

An example of how a seller can generate a Paylink using Xfers’ interface.

Working with the banks