B2B Cambodia sat down to interview Chhay Lin Lim, Founder and CEO of Monflo, a licensed crypto asset provider in the Netherlands that is seeking to bridge the gap between traditional banking and blockchain finance in a way that is simple, secure and sovereign.
Through Monflo, Chhay Lin is on a mission to make blockchain finance accessible to everyone, without requiring them to understand the complexity behind it.
B2B Cambodia: What inspired you to start Monflo, and how does your personal journey connect with its mission?
Chhay Lin Lim: “When I decided to start Monflo, I was a teacher of blockchain at a local university in the Netherlands. It was the same time that my mom had cancer, and it had me reflecting a lot about my personal life and the journey that I went through, from being a Cambodian refugee to someone who grew up in the Netherlands. It was also a time of very high inflation.
“What I found during my reflection is that it's such a shame that people, like my parents, who are not very financially literate, were losing a lot on inflation. In the years 2021-2022, inflation was very, very high. In the Netherlands, it was more than 10 per cent a year. Next to that, there was a new technology coming up in the blockchain space, which we call decentralised finance (DeFi), and using decentralised finance protocols, you are able to earn very good interest on your crypto assets—for example, your stablecoins like USDC, USDT, and other types of crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum.
I thought it was such a shame that very few people understand how blockchain technologies work, and therefore don't have access to those very good yield opportunities. Lastly, it was also very difficult to move your profits out to regular bank accounts so that you can actually spend it. All of this made me realise that it's so important to build a technology that allows people to get into blockchain finance very easily. At the same time, it must be so simple that everyone can understand it, even my parents will be able to use it, and to further give people new opportunities, like better yields than what they can earn at a regular bank.
B2B Cambodia: As I understand it, Monflo is a form of Web3 banking. What exactly is Web3 banking, and how is it different from traditional banking?
Chhay Lin Lim: “With traditional banking, you make use of a centralised financial institution, like a bank, that, for example, takes custody of your assets. But what's really important there is that you need to have trust in the central institution, in this case, the bank. Using Web3 bank accounts, or Web3 banking, you're trying to eliminate intermediaries, like banks, as much as possible. We always say in this space that you should become your own bank. You should not trust intermediaries to take care of your finances. Web3 allows for that, and Web3 is a technology that is built on top of blockchain.
“Imagine that every time you make a deposit in your bank account, a stablecoin variant of the Euro or the USD, is minted on the blockchain. If you do that, then you can have full transparency that your assets are actually there in your wallet on the blockchain. You don't need to trust the bank that your assets are there. So Web3 bank accounts look like regular bank accounts, but every deposit there automatically becomes a crypto Euro, crypto USD, in other words, a stablecoin. And using blockchain technology, you have full transparency that your assets are really there.”
B2B Cambodia: Many people are still intimidated by crypto. How does Monflo make Web3 accessible to everyday users and businesses?
Chhay Lin Lim: “It’s a shame in our industry that there's still a lot of money in centralised finance, or you can call it traditional finance. I believe that the future is blockchain finance, but it's so difficult for people to move their money from traditional to blockchain finance. So I want to give them something they are familiar with, in this case, a bank account.
“When you open an account on Monflo, you receive a bank account with a regular bank account number. You just deposit Euros there, and it is automatically converted into crypto Euros. You don’t need to know anything about blockchain, you don't need to know anything about crypto, anything about wallets. It feels as if you hold this crypto Euro in your own bank account. To move from traditional finance to blockchain finance, in other words, to on-ramp, is for free. We don't charge anything. So if you put 1,000 Euros in your bank account, immediately turning it into crypto Euros has no costs involved.
What is special about Web3 bank accounts is they also allow you to send your crypto Euros to regular bank accounts. So one of the biggest banks in the Netherlands is ING Bank. Others are AMRO Bank, Rabobank, I can just send crypto Euros back to those banks [from Monflo], and the beneficiary receives normal Euros.
B2B Cambodia: Do you plan to bring this financial innovation here to Cambodia one day?
Chhay Lin Lim: “Yeah, one of the reasons that I'm here is because I want to talk to several financial institutions, because I know that the Cambodian government is also preparing for a stablecoin act, and I believe for banks, it's so essential that they prepare for this act. Because why would you not want to make use of a stablecoin, if a stablecoin settles instantly against very low cost. Imagine if I could send my crypto USD from Monflo directly to a bank account in Cambodia without any cost involved.
Right now, if I want to send USD from, for example, ING Bank (in the Netherlands) to a traditional bank in Cambodia, it costs me like USD 60 something, even USD 70, just in transaction fees. I think that payments should be as simple, cheap and as fast as sending an email.
“If you want to issue your own stablecoin, part of that fiat money that is used as collateral is also used to invest in AAA government bonds. So [stablecoins] also become a geopolitical tool for people to strengthen their own currency. And I believe that if the NBC in Cambodia is going to allow, let's say, a crypto Riel, it can be used to strengthen the government as well, because there's a lot of money coming in that they can use for investing in public services, in the public infrastructure.”
Watch Part 2 of our interview with Chhay Lin:
B2B Cambodia: What types of people and businesses are you building Monflo for? Who benefits most from it?
Chhay Lim Lim: “There are a lot of people who want to have exposure to crypto assets, but they don't know how to start, and with us, they can start fairly easily without having technical know-how. So now I've only been talking about Web3 bank accounts, but we also have other features within our application. Another feature is the exchange feature. You can exchange your crypto euros within the platform, directly for all crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and many others.
“Secondly, a lot of companies in Europe cannot open bank accounts if they are involved with crypto activities. To give an example, around 15 per cent of crypto companies in Europe can’t open a bank account, which is a shame, because maybe they don't do anything illegal, right? Even us at Monflo were rejected by eight banks. Why? Only because we were involved with crypto activities, and we are even licensed in the Netherlands. This actually forced me to think about what I can do to change this, and that sparked the idea of creating a Web3 bank account. If they would have given me a bank account from the start, I would not have built something that actually competes with what they are doing!
“The third target group are people who want to have financial self-sovereignty, that want to be financially autonomous, that want full insight that their assets are really there. With us, every stablecoin Euro is collateralised, actually, over-collateralised with 102 per cent, and you can always see on the blockchain that it's there, unlike regular banks, because banks can loan out your money without you knowing it, so there's a risk involved. With us, we don't loan out your money, it’s always there. So for those people who are looking for safety, who are looking for financial sovereignty, Monflo is a very good solution.
“It is very important for us to know who our customers are. So everyone who wants to become a customer at Monflo needs to go through what we call a KYC (Know Your Customer) process. We ask you questions like your name, your birthdate, also your potential investment amount, and based on that, we can build a risk profile for you. This risk profile is also very important for us to apply to anti-money laundering (AML) services. What's very important for us is we don't want to have illegal money coming into our platform, so we have built systems that allow us to find out if you're on the sanctions list or not, also to do analytics on the blockchain to see if maybe your transactions are coming from illegitimate sources. We are fully regulated, and this is required for you to have a licence.”
B2B Cambodia: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about Web3 banking or crypto in general that you’d like to clear up?
Chhay Lim Lim: “Well, there are still people who say that crypto is a scam, a fad, just a trend that will fade away—that's not true. In the United States, they signed the Genius Act, which actually encourages the USD stablecoin. And I understand why the United States wants to do that, because if you issue a USD stablecoin, the fiat USD is partly used to buy government bonds. U.S. government bonds. This is a very nice way for them to finance their debt. The European Central Bank recently said they need to encourage people or companies that are going to issue Euro stablecoins as a countermovement against the big usage of the USD stablecoin, because they are afraid that if all Europeans might start using USD stablecoins—because it's much faster, cheaper transactions and so forth—more money will move away from the Euro to the USD, strengthening the USD and weakening the Euro.
“I think that no matter what, you cannot get away from this new technology. A lot of countries, at the start, when blockchain emerged and when crypto emerged, tried to block crypto and tried to block blockchain developments, but they were not able to do that. The technology is decentralised, it is impossible to put it back in the jar. So what I want to say is: crypto is not a scam, mass adoption is definitely coming. There's now more than USD 250 billion in stablecoins. Last year, around USD 34 trillion was settled in stablecoins, that is more than Visa and Mastercard settling combined. Every financial institution needs to have a stablecoin strategy. They need to move to crypto and blockchain. Otherwise they will miss out on the action, and they may face too much competition, and therefore they may die out.”
B2B Cambodia: Looking ahead, what’s your long-term vision on the future of digital finance?
Chhay Lim Lim: “Digital finance cannot be stopped. The future of Monflo is that we want to make Web3 bank accounts more accessible to other parts of the world as well. Right now we hold a licence in the Netherlands so we can have Dutch customers. I believe that within a month, by September 2025, we will have a licence for all of the European Union (EU), so everyone in the EU can become a customer of Monflo. We're also looking beyond Europe. We're looking at Cambodia, we're looking at the United States. So I hope that within five years time, we can have customers all over the world who are going to do payments through stablecoins, giving them more exposure to crypto assets.”