Blockchain solution addresses FX challenges at PhotonPay
Published: Feb 2026
Best Foreign Exchange Solution
Highly Commended Winner
PhotonPay
Photo of Ivan Chen, PhotonPay.
Ivan Chen
Global Partnerships & Strategies
PhotonPay, an AI-powered financial infrastructure serving over 200,000 businesses worldwide. With a global presence spanning 10+ offices and operations in 230+ countries and regions, the company delivers simple, scalable, and customisable solutions. This suite – which includes checkout, accounts, issuing, domestic/international payments, and embedded finance – is designed to enable businesses to accelerate product development, enhance operational efficiency and drive sustainable growth.
The challenge
PhotonPay operates as a critical financial infrastructure for SMEs seeking to compete in global markets. Licensed across multiple treasury jurisdictions, the company faced escalating operational constraints that threatened its ability to serve this vital customer base effectively.
PhotonPay’s treasury team managed a complex web of banking relationships across multiple banks, making up a sprawling network of disconnected accounts. This fragmented model created isolated liquidity pools with no access to global foreign exchange capabilities, forcing the company to maintain substantial liquidity buffers across multiple accounts in different jurisdictions.
PhotonPay’s fragmented banking architecture meant that when the need for cross-currency trades arose during evening hours, the treasury team could only manage risk or execute back-to-back trades the following day due to traditional banking cut-offs. This created substantial operational risk as foreign exchange exposures remained unhedged overnight.
The centralised treasury team struggled with manual interventions required for urgent transfers, with staff working overtime to manage cross-time-zone operations. Cross-currency fund movements consistently resulted in T+1 or T+2 settlement delays for customer payouts, while the inability to execute fund movements in an automated manner created cash flow constraints for clients.
Operating on a limited automation budget, PhotonPay required banking partnerships that could deliver sophisticated treasury capabilities without massive technological investments. The company needed a solution enabling 24/7 cross-border and cross-currency movements through programmable, automated execution capabilities essential for maintaining its competitive positioning among its peers. Additionally, PhotonPay required a banking partner capable of providing enterprise-level automation with minimal client-side technology investment to make room for future scalable growth that the current manual system did not allow for. This would enable the company to compete effectively against larger, better-resourced competitors in the cross-border payments sector.
The solution
Photonpay leveraged the Kinexys Digital Payments system, the industry’s pioneering blockchain-based foreign exchange solution provided by a bank. The solution aims to fundamentally transform traditional treasury constraints by leveraging the power of distributed ledger technology. The new system can provide 24/7 liquidity access through Kinexys Blockchain Deposit Accounts (BDAs) with on-chain foreign exchange capabilities. The solution enables cross-border, cross‑currency movements executed within 90 seconds, a dramatic improvement from T+1 or T+2 settlements. Supporting nine global locations and five major currencies covering 90% of daily foreign exchange demand, Kinexys provides extended settlement windows of eight additional hours beyond traditional banking cut‑offs. This eliminates the multi-day settlement delays that previously constrained treasury services.
Best practice and innovation
The platform’s programmable payments feature enables rule-based, automated fund management based on predefined conditions and liquidity thresholds. This includes the ability to make payments and internal treasury movements on an automated basis, eliminating the need for manual daily calculations and pre-funding requirements during holidays. This unique and distinctive blockchain infrastructure offers unparalleled market capabilities, providing equivalent 24/7 foreign exchange settlement functionality.
The implementation fundamentally transformed the daily experience of PhotonPay’s treasury professionals. Previously, staff worked overtime managing manual cross‑time-zone operations, with two to three team members dedicated exclusively to calculating daily repayment requirements and monitoring foreign exchange exposures manually. With the establishment of Kinexys, automated rule-based systems eliminated after-hours manual interventions, dramatically improving work-life balance while reducing operational stress. Treasury professionals are able to transition from reactive transaction processors to proactive global liquidity managers, instead being able to rely on the programmable payments functionality, which enabled automatic risk management based on predefined conditions. This freed staff to focus on client services, innovation and strategic treasury oversight rather than repetitive manual tasks.
Key benefits
Cost savings.
Headcount savings.
Process efficiencies.
Increased automation.
Risk mitigated.
Errors reduced.
Number of banking partners/bank accounts reduced.
Manual intervention reduced.
Future-proof solution.
Exceptional implementation (budget/time).
The Adam Smith Awards Asia are the industry benchmark for best practice and innovation in corporate treasury. To find out more please visit treasurytoday.com/adam-smith-awards-asia
