# 4- What are the barriers to entry for competitors, and how does the company plan to maintain its competitive advantage?

# Regulation and Licensing Barriers

One of the most notable aspects of the Ephelia Group is its regulatory infrastructure.

In the past few years, Ephelia has focused on securing licenses and authorisations to operate in major jurisdictions as an Electronic Money Institution: Europe, the UK, Switzerland, the US and New Zealand.

This regulatory foundation provides a unique and substantial advantage over any other company.

In fact, Ephelia guarantees to be able to operate in the field of payments and issuing/acquiring electronic money (and therefore also stablecoins).

The latest development in the global regulatory framework was the approval of the regulation on crypto-asset markets (MiCA), which for the first time introduced and established uniform market rules in the EU for all crypto-assets by incorporating them into the legislation governing electronic money.

Recently, the UK has also decreed the official entry of crypto-assets into the supervised scope of the Financial Markets Authority.

A trend that will soon see the United States and Asian markets replicate these regulations, effectively scaling up the quality of crypto services but, as a natural consequence, wiping out all those projects that are not or cannot be supported within the regulatory perimeter.

This evolution has seen the big players begin to take corrective action with not always, the hoped-for effects. The most notorious case was the German authority's refusal to grant Binance a license as an e-money institution.

Ephelia's vision to acquire licenses in advance shows the forward-looking nature of its management. In addition to this, Ephelia acquired a full asset manager's license in Switzerland in 2021, ensuring that investment solutions are also supported.

Regulatory approval is an advantage that is hard for competitors to match. In fact, setting up such a regulated infrastructure would take years and a significant investment effort both in terms of skilled resources and expenses.

It is an ever-evolving journey that has seen Ephelia, just in the last few days, submitting an application for a banking license to the Swiss authority, as well as exploring licenses that can support emerging markets such as Africa, India and Asia in general.

Thanks to this technology and our licenses, we are able to reach a much more diversified and broader audience in many vertical sectors: Banks, Local Authorities, Publishers, Utility Service Providers, Lending Providers, DeFi and CeFiI players who now need regulated support that can sustain them in legal, technological and risk management terms.

Streamable Finance will be the first company to have a fully compliant CeFi/DeFi protocol with its bank-grade KYC onboarding.

For more details on the comparison, see the competitor analysis

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