XTransfer operates as a global business-to-business (B2B) cross-border payments platform offering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) digital collections, foreign exchange (FX) and compliance services. The company has expanded from China into Singapore, Hong Kong, Europe and the Middle East, positioning itself as a regulated payments institution serving emerging market trade flows.

Violas Xiao, the local CEO of XTransfer Singapore, leads the company’s regional hub, managing its financial, sales and marketing functions, its relationships with regulators and central banks, and the licensing pathway that enables the firm to scale across ASEAN. She outlined how XTransfer is using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven compliance, local currency settlement, virtual account infrastructure and strategic partnerships to remove friction for SMEs operating across complex and diverse markets in ASEAN. These priorities align with the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF)’s emphasis on building a technology blueprint for the next decade of finance.

XTransfer’s regional mandate and Singapore’s strategic role

Xiao described Singapore as both a financial and commercial gateway for XTransfer’s ambitions across ASEAN. She explained, “Singapore serve as a regional hub for our company not only for the financial perspective but also from a sales and marketing perspective,” adding that the city’s strategic location and reputation make it the point where “most of our banking partners actually are located” and where “SME merchants or even big customers have their treasury hub.” This positioning allows XTransfer to anchor both regulatory engagement and commercial expansion.

A core part of her role involves securing alignment with regulators and central banks. Xiao noted that she is responsible for explaining “what XTransfer is going to do in this region-what kind of solution we are going to provide to the SMEs and help the companies to get the necessary licence to expand.” The regulatory diversity across ASEAN means this engagement is essential to XTransfer’s model.

Singapore’s hub role also affects corridor development. While XTransfer’s early strength was in China-ASEAN flows, the shift towards “intra ASEAN corridors, for example, like Vietnam selling to Singapore, Singapore selling to Indonesia,” has required Xtransfer to create new wallet and settlement capabilities. The firm is now supporting Chinese manufacturers relocating to Southeast Asia, helping them “collect monies from all the emerging markets like, Latin America, Africa and Middle East.”

The reconfiguration of trade corridors and supply chains directly mirrors the SFF technology-blueprint emphasis on adaptive infrastructure across markets with heterogeneous regulatory constraints. Xtransfer’s operating model illustrates what the festival describes as incremental, interoperable upgrades to existing payment rails rather than disruptive reinvention.

Pain points for SMEs in cross-border payments

Xiao highlighted that cross-border movement of funds remains a major challenge for SMEs in ASEAN. Many struggle with efficient, affordable settlement because traditional banks focus on revenue potential and risk exposure. As she put it, “most banks  don’t really like to serve SME clients”, leaving SMEs with few choices beyond informal channels such as “underground banking or hawala system to move money,” which she noted is “not safe.”

The heterogeneity of ASEAN regulatory regimes means the region is “a little bit more like complicated than  European countries or United States”, with every regulator adopting different currency and reporting rules. XTransfer’s proposition is to “remove all these frictions for SMEs”, offering money collection, payment, FX  and risk management with transparency. Every cross-border payment passes through “proper regulatory reporting to tell the central bank what are the underlying transactions, physical goods or logistics.”

The interplay between regulatory reporting, data granularity and digital identity is a central theme in the SFF blueprint discussions, and XTransfer’s approach illustrates how SME-focused providers are operationalising these requirements. The company’s movement into Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America reflects shifts in global supply chains, with SMEs responding quickly to geopolitics and currency volatility. Xiao pointed out that although China-US export flows on XTransfer’s platform fell from “22%” in 2018 to “9%,” now, total volume has “doubled, because SMEs moved into new corridors.

AI, risk management and compliance architecture

XTransfer has built an in-house AI-driven risk management system. Xiao emphasised the dual requirement for scale and compliance: “How I be able to scale fast but at the same time deliver a high standard of compliance controls.” While compliance is often cited as a major cost burden, she explained that XTransfer aggregates data “from import, export, logistic,all over the world” to feed its AI models.

The system uses “advanced AI and large language model” technology to enhance fraud detection. According to Xiao, XTransfer’s compliance cost is “only 5% of a traditional bank” yet its fraud ratio is “0.03%, much lower than the market standard.” This balance of efficiency and safety aligns closely with SFF’s technology-blueprint emphasis on reducing structural costs while maintaining systemic resilience.

The effort to build a “unified B2B risk management standard” together with central banks showcases how fintechs can support supervisory alignment across diverse jurisdictions. This is also consistent with SFF’s focus on machine-readable compliance, standardisation and programmable safeguards.

Local currency settlement, virtual accounts and the acceleration of trade cycles

Local currency settlement and virtual accounts are central to XTransfer’s technical offering. Xiao noted that SMEs fundamentally conduct account-to-account transfers, and virtual accounts replicate this behaviour in digital form across diverse markets. Buyers in “Indonesia, Singapore or even Vietnam and Thailand” can pay in their preferred local currencies using instant payment schemes such as FAST, BI-FAST, PromptPay and LaPass. Funds are then “instantly credited into the virtual account”, allowing sellers in China to “see the money in their wallet instantly” and release goods faster.

The removal of settlement delays reduces the total trade cycle and lowers costs because “local clearing is much, much cheaper, even zero cost”. This mirrors what SFF frames as the broader transition from traditional correspondent banking chains to increasingly real-time, application programming interface (API)-connected and locally routed infrastructure.

SMEs benefit from these shifts disproportionately because they typically lack the liquidity buffers available to larger corporates. The acceleration of working capital cycles is therefore a key theme that both XTransfer and the SFF blueprint highlight as critical to emerging-market competitiveness.

Partnerships, ecosystem collaboration and the role of XNet

XTransfer’s partnership model is built around what Xiao callsed the “XNet ecosystem”, involving financial institution partners “including traditional banks, global banks, regional banks and local banks, fintech partners,stablecoin acquiring” parties, regulators and central banks. XTransfer positions itself as “the bridge  between these two parties and our end customers.”

This mirrors SFF’s technology-blueprint focus on modular collaboration and shared infrastructure rather than siloed systems. Xiao argued that SMEs, although costly to serve, can be onboarded safely if risk controls are transparent and data-driven. By demonstrating risk mitigation and client profiling, XTransfer reduces the compliance burden for banks and regulators. “We have been doing for years with central banks and financial institutions (FI) to build a B2B risk management standard,” she said.

Partnerships also support cost optimisation. As transaction volume grows, XTransfer gains “better negotiation power” with ecosystem partners, which can reduce costs while maintaining standards. This reflects the SFF emphasis on economies of scale in shared utilities and compliance infrastructure.

Stablecoins, blockchain and emerging payment technologies

Xiao described a shift in XTransfer’s approach towards stablecoins. Previously, the company hesitated due to uncertainty in regulation and banking adoption. Now, however, XTransfer is “open minded and embracing this technology”, noting that “blockchain is a good technology and that’s the trend in the future.”

The key challenge, she stressed is compliance. XTransfer must demonstrate “how we can do the good compliance work, even if we use stablecoin”. The firm is applying for licences globally, including “Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) or Digital Payment Token Service (DPTS) in Singapore,” and she believes that “the final winner in the stablecoin area will be the one licensed, regulated,showing high standard compliance job as they are doing in the fiat work”.

SFF has increasingly highlighted this convergence between fiat infrastructures and regulated digital assets, and Xiao’s comments reflect this direction. For SME payment flows, the question is less about disruption than about building programmable, transparent and regulated extensions of existing systems.

Balancing cost, efficiency and trust for SMEs

Xiao concluded that SMEs care fundamentally about “cost, time, flexibility and efficiency”. XTransfer’s strategy is to build solutions that meet these needs at a reasonable cost while remaining compliant. By integrating with instant payment routes in countries such as Brazil and Singapore, reducing costs through bank partnerships, and lowering compliance expenditure with AI systems, XTransfer aims to support SME globalisation in a secure and transparent manner.

She stressed that trust will continue to depend on licensing and regulatory alignment. By working with central banks to define B2B risk management standards, securing licences across ASEAN, and maintaining transparency, XTransfer aims to build a durable cross-border payments infrastructure.

These priorities reflect the themes of the SFF’s technology blueprint, which emphasises resilient, data-driven, interoperable and AI-enabled infrastructure for the next decade of financial services. XTransfer’s approach provides one example of how such principles are being applied in the high-volume SME and emerging-market segments, where efficiency and compliance must advance together.