Putting the Safe in SafeRE
SafeRE is an ethical real estate investment marketplace for investors and asset owners. The innovative platform offers a transparent investing process and aims to disrupt the traditional investment industry. It tokenizes quality real estate investments, allowing investors to partake in otherwise inaccessible institutional-grade investments and eliminates hidden costs and intermediaries. By offering automated solutions, SafeRE eliminates the messiness, errors and intentional malpractice that could occur during manual processing. Another one of the platform’s biggest USPs is how safe it is.
How does SafeRE deliver a secure marketplace?
The platform takes a two-pronged approach to ensure the safety of its clients – a) by using blockchain technology secured by a cryptographic system to offer transparency while warding off cybercriminals and b) strict regulatory compliance.
An overview of the regulatory background
SafeRE is headquartered in Singapore, a member of the FATF. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body that functions as the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog. It sets international standards to prevent these illegal activities. SafeRE is also governed by MAS regulations.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is the country’s central bank and acts as a financial agent of the Government of Singapore. It regulates the country’s financial services sector and is responsible for ensuring monetary stability as well as credit and exchange policies that are conducive to the growth of the economy.
SafeRE’s equity and debt instruments are issued and registered in compliance with MAS regulations. The offerings on the platform are managed and issued by licensed fund managers under the Capital Markets Service license (issued by the regulatory authority). SafeRE also complies with the AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) checks required by MAS. These are in line with international standards for onboarding investors and help protect both asset owners and investors. The Customer Due Diligence Standards have been formulated to help comply with ML/TF Risk Assessment protocols.
The importance of KYC
ML/TF Risk Assessment helps “identify and assess money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risks and the controls needed to manage and mitigate the risks an organisation may reasonably face”[1]. ML/TF risks include Environmental Risk, Customer Risk, Business Risk, Channel Risk, Product Risk and Country Risk. The assessment framework identifies dimensions in each category and helps assess the effectiveness of the protocols put in place. For example, customer or user anonymity, access by third parties, availability or use overseas and the ability to use or gain access to cash, are known to make a product/service more vulnerable to ML/TF risk. Processes like customer data collection, transaction/source of wealth analysis etc. help lower the Product’s Residual Risk rating (aka the ML/TF risk after controls have been put in place).
Play it smart and safe with SafeRE
When looking to invest in real estate, stakeholders should choose a transparent, traceable and secure vehicle. This is particularly important while investing in foreign real estate, where the physical asset is many miles away and vetting the other party requires international support. SafeRE’s focus on data completeness, identity verification and personal data protection ensures the safety of transactions for asset owners and investors alike.
[1] https://arctic-intelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/AMLA-Risk-Assessment-Methodology-Published-31-Jan-2018.pdf
