By Marine Fleury
Original article published in French in Décideurs Magazine on July 18, 2022 (link).
"We have the ambition to be one of the most successful blockchains"
WeCan Group’s ambition is to make the Web as responsible and secure as possible. With a global reach, the Swiss company, which has fifteen employees, reveals its current projects.
Décideurs Magazine. How did the WeCan Group come about?
Vincent Pignon. I founded this company in 2015 with the ambition to serve wealth management players through blockchain technology. In 2021, we launched the WeCan Comply platform which is a marketplace between private banks and their external wealth managers, especially in Switzerland. We have already brought together 13 banks, the main ones being Pictet, Lombard Odier, Julius Baer or Edmond de Rothschild, and 80 independent wealth managers.
The goal is to manage their compliance documentation in order to facilitate the entry into relationship and the annual reviews between these actors. In collaboration with the Blockchain Association for Finance, to which our clients must adhere, we manage the standards and security of the tools developed.
What are your current projects?
Our clients’ issues are so specific that we needed tools that were aligned with their needs. We are currently working on Wecan Connect, a WhatsApp-like tool for private banks, their intermediaries and end customers.
The main challenge is to fight against transaction fraud or email phishing. Integrated with its tools, the asset manager will see all communications. The end client will benefit from the application on his mobile to communicate with his entire ecosystem (private banks, managers, lawyers, notaries, advisors, etc.).
You have just launched your token…
Indeed, we announced it at the beginning of June during CryptoDay. It is a token that enables to pay transaction fees on our blockchain. We have successfully completed our first private presale and are starting an international road-show. Eventually, all our customers could pay their transactions with the Token, especially when using Wecan Connect.
What education is provided to your clients on these subjects?
Today, more and more people are interested in this technology without having the fundamentals and the subject becomes very complicated. We have therefore co-created with a French school a 15-day training course on blockchain.
What about responsible finance?
When we sold our tools, one of the sticking points was the environmental part of the blockchain. We therefore decided to create a research program with the École Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL) to compare the main blockchains on three points: security, scalability and energy consumption.
When we created our own blockchain, we integrated these results with the ambition of being one of the best performing on these three criteria. The results will be made public by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne via a dedicated platform.
What are your areas of development?
Initially, we focused on the wealth management and private banking segment, but we are increasingly opening up to all the other players in the wealth management industry, namely lawyers, notaries, portfolio managers, etc.
We have also started a strong collaboration with Michel Reybier, a major player in the luxury goods industry, in order to offer our solutions to end customers of palaces, private clinics and luxury professionals.
More globally, our ambition is to offer solutions that respect the privacy and security of personal data in a simple way. We are also starting to develop internationally, including France, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Singapore and Monaco, always in co-creation with the wealth management industry.
