Prasos, a Finnish cryptocurrency service provider, has signed an agreement with Aussie fintech iSignthis to use its Paydentity platform to process identity verification and payments.

Paydentity brings together identity verification and payments processing, making it possible to authenticate a person’s identity and process a payment within minutes.

Prasos was founded in 2012 and in the 2018 financial year received more than €140 million in cryptocurrency deposits, while trading volume in broker services exceeded €220m.

The partnership allows Prasos to meet forthcoming anti-money laundering (AML) know-your-customer (KYC) transaction monitoring requirements.

iSignthis (ASX:ISX) chief John Karantzis told Stockhead it was the latest coup for the platform in the crypto space, making it one of the world’s best services for anti-money laundering (AML).

“The nearest thing to our product is the verification process that PayPal uses,” Mr Karantzis said. “But that takes about three days, whereas we can onboard users, authenticate identity and process payments within three minutes.”

Mr Karantzis said the company had been steadily growing the business, with the cryptocurrency space providing plenty of opportunity and the numbers back it up: in 2018 revenue grew 362 per cent while receipts from customers increased 1,040 per cent to $4.9 million.

The company’s full year loss was $5.5 million, however.

“We’re making some great inroads, particularly in the crypto space where we are providing a platform that is helping the crypto market become more regulated,” he said.

He envisaged that the company’s standing would continue to rise as regulators seek firmer control of cryptocurrencies and banks are pulled up on shoddy behaviour.

“Paydentity underpins our transactional banking systems, it’s like an identity firewall,” he said. “That in the process allows us to avoid situations like what happened with the CommBank breaching counter-terrorism finance laws.”

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