XREX Group, a blockchain financial institution, won the Regulatory Excellence Award at the first AFA Awards, emerging from 88 corporate nominations across the Asia-Pacific region as one of five overall winners. It was also the only Taiwanese team nominated by the Taiwan FinTech Association to receive an award. The company announced the recognition on Sept. 7, 2026, following the final round and award ceremony held on Sept. 1.
The award recognized XREX Group’s long-running investment in compliant operations and risk management, along with the compliance structure it has established in both Taiwan and Singapore. The report said the group has applied blockchain technology to virtual asset trading and stablecoin-based cross-border payments, while also building regtech tools to strengthen anti-scam and anti-money laundering work.
How the AFA Awards selected winners
The AFA Awards are organized by the Asia FinTech Alliance, or AFA. Nominations are by invitation, with fintech associations representing 16 Asian economies recommending participating companies. Each economy can nominate up to seven firms.
That means a nomination already reflects screening and competition in the company’s home market. The first AFA Awards received 88 corporate nominations in total, then moved through two selection rounds — a top 30 and a top 10. Final winners in five award categories were chosen on Sept. 1 after seven international judges heard live presentations and Q&A sessions from the 10 finalists.
Wayne Huang: fraud and money laundering are shared industry costs
During the final presentation, XREX Group co-founder and Group CEO Wayne Huang said the risks tied to fraud, financial crime and money laundering are not problems for a single financial institution to solve on its own. He described them as costs borne by the financial industry as a whole.
According to the Global State of Scams 2025 report released by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, estimated fraud losses over the past year reached $442 billion across 42 surveyed markets. In the blockchain finance sector, the challenge is also direct and large. TRM Labs said about $35 billion in cryptocurrency flowed into scam projects in 2025.
For XREX Group, the report said these are not abstract figures. In Singapore, the group holds a Major Payment Institution, or MPI, license and provides stablecoin-based B2B cross-border payment services. In Taiwan, its subsidiary Chainrank Co. operates the XREX exchange and has completed anti-money laundering registration with the Financial Supervisory Commission, making it a registered virtual asset service provider, or VASP. The report said those risks are part of the company’s day-to-day operating reality.
Huang said, 「Fraud and money laundering risks are costs shared by the financial industry.」 He argued that such shared costs should not be handled separately by each institution, and that the central issue is finding effective ways to lower those common costs. He said that was the original reason XREX developed XRAY, its blockchain wallet address search and anti-scam tool.
What XRAY does
XRAY offers a free high-risk wallet screening service. Its main users include traditional financial institutions, law enforcement agencies and virtual asset service providers. The report said users can check a blockchain wallet address within one second to see the platform it belongs to, related risk information, on-chain labels, and the categories and amounts of assets held in that wallet. They can also continue with fund-flow tracing and investigation work.
More recently, XRAY has added AI tools to help users understand complex blockchain fund flows more quickly. The report said the system is being used across several scenarios, including daily risk management and transaction monitoring at financial institutions, case investigations by law enforcement, and public-private cooperation against financial crime. Its approach combines on-chain data analysis, risk identification and AI tools to improve fund tracing and financial crime prevention.
Three categories of cost
In his AFA Awards presentation, Huang grouped the costs created by fraud and money laundering into three categories: technology and compliance costs, customer experience costs, and public trust.
The first category covers continued spending by financial institutions on transaction monitoring, risk management, anti-money laundering systems and compliance staff. The second involves customer experience: more reviews and verification procedures may reduce risk, but they can also add friction to legitimate transactions. The third, and the hardest to quantify, is public trust. The report said that when fraud and financial crime continue to occur, the impact is not limited to a single institution. It can also weaken user trust in the broader industry and in emerging financial technology.
Huang said fraud and money laundering do not stop at borders, and blockchain finance does not either. In that context, cross-industry, cross-border and cross-regional cooperation is critical to lower costs together and improve public trust. For XREX Group, winning the Regulatory Excellence Award not only brought recognition from international judges, but also opened a deeper link to the 16 Asian economies covered by AFA.
As stablecoins and blockchain are used more widely in cross-border payments and fund transfers, the report said an important question for the sector will be how to build consistent and effective risk identification and fund-tracing capabilities across different markets.
AFA’s cross-border network across 16 Asian economies
AFA Chair and Taiwan FinTech Association honorary chairperson Tsai Yu-ling used the phrase “One Award, 16 Economies, Infinite Possibilities” at the award ceremony to explain the purpose behind the AFA Awards. She said Asian fintech needs not more isolated innovation, but cooperative bridges that can scale across markets.
She added that the awards focus on whether companies can show verifiable cross-border results and whether they can bring their solutions into different markets. Winning, in her description, is not just about receiving a trophy. It also means entering AFA’s cross-border cooperation network.
AFA Vice Chair Wilson Beh also announced at the ceremony that companies in the AFA Awards top 30 will automatically receive Affiliate Membership in the alliance. From there, AFA plans to help connect companies with local associations, capital, industry partners, market resources and ecosystem participants based on their target markets, regulatory and licensing needs, and strategic cooperation plans.
About XREX Group
XREX Group was founded in 2018. The report described it as an international financial institution with blockchain technology that works closely with banks, governments and users.
In Taiwan, its subsidiary Chainrank Co. operates the XREX exchange. According to the report, the company completed its anti-money laundering compliance declaration with Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission in March 2022, and completed the commission’s AML registration on Sept. 22, 2025, making it one of 10 compliant virtual asset service providers that had completed registration. In Singapore, the group’s subsidiary obtained a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore in May 2024.
The report also said XREX Group treats financial inclusion as a social responsibility, continues to use blockchain technology to advance access to financial participation, financial usage and financial education, and has launched XREX Academy as a structured education program on blockchain and virtual assets.