aXpire is a blockchain spend management system. The company seeks to apply its proven waste management techniques via blockchain management to help companies operate leaner and with less fluff in their numbers caused by human error, work duplication, and outdated paper filing systems. aXpire considers itself a software-as-a-service enterprise resource planning company.
“A payment ecosystem to manage expenses through an efficient, secure and automated process does not yet exist,” the company said. “Data is too often siloed between non-compatible softwares and companies are left to store information on paper, PDFs and spreadsheets. There are often a number of business needs that are left unaddressed as a whole in the current software marketplace.”
In fact, bad data management can make up 15–25 percent of any given company’s revenues, aXpire said, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Who Is Leading the Project?
Gary Markham has served as the company’s CEO since December 2016. He previously served with insurtech company and aXpire originator LSG LLC as a strategy advisor, beginning in January 2006.
aXpire’s program director, Philip Knight, is another LSG veteran, having served as chief product officer since July 2012. Concurrently, Knight was on the not-for-profit Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard Oversight Committee.
aXpire’s home office is located at 80 Broad St. in New York City.
What Does aXpire Do?
aXpire’s blockchain technology is specialized for use in the financial sector; specifically, for handling expenses for banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. The company plans to eventually take its business model to companies outside of the financial sector as it grows, modeling the path taken by its originator LSG LLC. LSG LLC’s past clients have included household names like IBM, Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Intel.
aXpire’s Partners
aXpire currently is a founding member of the International RegTech Association and works in conjunction with the Microsoft Partners Network, R3, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Kotoba, and more.
How Does It Work?
aXpire’s signature system is the Resolvr spend management software. Resolvr integrates existing data sets from proprietary enterprise resource management software and then applies blockchain tech to make each portion of that data operate more efficiently – and, often, independently.
“In the first release of ‘Resolvr,’ we are facilitating the seamless, auditable workflows of digital expenses management, review, apportionment and allocation according to the fund or funds to which every dollar should be associated,” aXpire said in its white paper summary. “There are accounts reconciliation, oversight and control mechanisms built in to ensure all stakeholders can share information, make adjustments, send annotations, attachments and other communications before the final product is handed over to a client’s finance department.”
In essence, aXpire’s system works as a universal manager for expenses.
What’s the Advantage Over Traditional Systems?
aXpire believes it can leverage blockchain technology to hack the waste and inefficiency out of legacy systems. Human error is kept to a minimum, as the blockchain is set up to work with minimal outside interaction. Data is kept both secure and neatly in order in a cloud-based system by the blockchain’s inherent cryptographic system. aXpire can also use artificial intelligence algorithms to improve upon its beginning processes.
This can have big repercussions for all company sizes, but particularly large companies handling extraordinary amounts of payment data. Little errors, human and otherwise, tend to accumulate in such systems. Moreover, the sheer size and reach of some companies mean that a large number of different data handling systems and procedures will be present. Introducing a single, blockchain-based system smooths the rough edges and creates synergies out of previously dysfunctional or unorganized systems.
How Are Security and Data Coherency Handled?
Blockchains are, by nature, a secure system of handling data, as the global blockchain is independently verified and synced with its individual nodes. This system creates fewer points of weakness and allows instant checks at every level in the chain. A fund seeking to use aXpire’s blockchain technology could be assured of its data integrity.
“We also leave an immutable trail of transactions that provides value throughout the auditing, compliance and reporting process for any client that is required to understand company spend and profitability data,” aXpire wrote. “Regulated hedge funds, for example, need to report fund expenses to the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission). Any user of our software will also be able to view, in real time, spend data across the company, providing live data for intelligent profit maximization.”
This ability to view and manipulate data in real-time while maintaining its security and integrity is one of the hallmarks of the entire blockchain ecosystem. It introduces a measure of security that even physical systems have a hard time matching. After all, it’s impossible for all of the data in cold storage in a warehouse to be simultaneously updated and verified, second by second. aXpire’s blockchain technology leaps this hurdle.
aXpire’s Roadmap
In the first quarter of 2018, aXpire began to shop its new blockchain technology around to its existing customer base. Sometime in the second quarter, aXpire plans to release a beta version of its peer-to-peer marketplace, Match BX, with an enhanced version of its blockchain program, Resolvr, coming in the third quarter.
By the end of the year, aXpire hopes to be reaching out to customers outside of its traditional financial wheelhouse, or industry agnostic companies.
aXpire’s short-term roadmap goes to the second quarter of 2019. In the long term, aXpire hopes to be the spend management software solution of choice for a wide variety of industries.
“Going forward, aXpire will expand its spend management technologies across industries outside of asset management, e.g. natural resources, travel & leisure, healthcare, food & beverage, transportation etc., removing human-manual processes in the expense management lifecycle through a highly secure SaaS model,” the company said.
