SwapRent - About Us

Ralph Y. Liu is the Founder and Chairman of California-based Advanced e-Financial
Technologies, Inc. (AeFT). AeFT is currently a research and consultancy firm. It has been one of
the major providers for financial innovations in the new real estate and property derivatives field
since its inception in 2001. AeFT's earlier seminal REIFO venture attempt in early 2002 on
REIFO Exchange was regarded as the first online real estate futures and options exchange in
the global financial derivatives industry. Here below are some published references on the
original project for establishing and clarifying the patent prior art purposes.

The REIFO project fostered the subsequent interests and efforts by many other industry
participants to start exploring in this emerging field. The housing-led financial crisis that started
to appear in early 2007 has made its earlier extensive research and development work in the
preceding years coincidentally very relevant and timely.

In early 2006, AeFT pioneered the development of real estate index derivatives into more user
friendly consumer financial products. Notable examples are its patent pending SwapRent (SM)
instruments to facilitate the newly created "economic renting , owning and switching" concept as
well as the related new generation of mortgage products such as HELM, PELM and FVCM for
property owners and investors in countries located in many parts of the world. Upon introducing
this radically new simplifying and unifying consumer "economic renting/owning" or "economic
own-rent switching" concept, Ralph has been able to provide the similar economic benefits,
traditionally offered only by complicated financial derivatives in the past, to homeowners and
investors without having to resort to those traditional complex derivative instruments, since most
consumers are already very familiar with the many differences between the financial transactions
of owning and renting a real estate property.

Through its REIDeX subsidiary (a WIP prototype is currently located at http://www.REIDeX.com
for illustration and public education purposes), it provides a marketplace for the trading and
settlement support of the three types of SwapRent (SM) contracts (Generic, AG and DP) and
other property index-linked derivatives on both residential and commercial properties.

Due to the fact that the SwapRent (SM) system and its embedded mortgage product HELM were
originally invented based on an efficient flexible and reversible shared economic ownership
concept that is coincidentally ideologically consistent with the equity based profit sharing
principles of Islamic finance, Ralph has devoted much of his time in the entire year of 2009
researching Islamic banking practices in order to develop a new generation of Islamic mortgage
products based on a Sharia compliant version of SwapRent (SM) and HELM to introduce his
new "economic owning and renting" concepts to the 1.66 billion of global Muslim population.

The existing so called "Islamic mortgage" seems to be almost a direct mirror image copy of the
Western mortgages, but with an alternative name for the interest payments. Home owners and
borrowers could still get foreclosed and burdened by the debt obligations. The newly invented
SwapRent (SM) embedded mortgages products such as HELM and FARM were created to fix
those exact problems by providing a genuine equity based home ownership. This exciting new
type of housing finance products that was created under these Islamic finance principles was
explained in the following blog post FARM (Flexible And Reversible Musharak a h /M ortgage).

Subsequently, it has since evolved into a new home ownership structure called FARJHO
(Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership) which ends up providing similar ultimate
economic benefits universally to both Muslim and Western consumers alike. For the first time
people could finally own, occupy and use a residential property not only without Riba, the
burdening of people through the borrowing or lending of money, but also get to hold on to the
property under unforeseen future adverse economic situations.

The successful implementation of this new universal home ownership structure FARJHO by
homeowners could potentially make the term "mortgage foreclosure" or "property repossession"
obsolete, when borrowing is only allowed under the FARJHO proposed method, i.e. lending to
partial owners only at the member level and not at the property level. Future defaulting members
will be able to simply walk away quietly and be replaced without affecting other co-investors and
most importantly, without disturbing the home occupiers.

When lesser credit-worthy aspiring home owners have already resorted to this new equity
financing method, what is left for the banks to lend to will be much better credit quality home
buyers/borrowers. More free market based consumer choices will always be a win-win situation
for everybody under the uninhibited free market capitalism.

In the US, the legal entity structure selected back in 2010 to be used to implement the FARJHO
concept going forward is the familiar LLC structure in order to corporatize American homes, one
home at a time. People ought to know that borrowing should not be the only way to own homes.
When this new concept and method take off, it could finally accomplish the goal of creating a
liquid equity market for homes just like there have been liquid stock markets for major
businesses in many countries since over 300 years ago already.

For current commercial FARJHO offering, please visit http://www.InvestorsAlly.com or for the
non-profit operations at http://www.PeoplesAlly.org for low income working families.

Previously Ralph was the Chief Investment Officer and an Executive Vice President of China
Everbright (Guang-Dah) Bank based in Beijing where he introduced the first RMB (CNY) -
denominated interest rate swap to the Beijing inter-bank community that started the domestic
derivatives industry in China. Due to the newly created ability to manage the bank's asset and
liability through these new interest rate swaps, he was able to design and launch the first long
term fixed rate residential mortgage offered by the bank to the entire homeowners market in
China as well as the first fixed rate corporate loans for corporate borrowers in the country. Using
fixed interest rates to borrow from commercial banks was finally made possible for the first time
for Chinese homeowners and corporate borrowers since the introduction of the free market
concepts in the 80's by a previously central planning society under the Communist government.
Chinese business entities finally got to compete with American, Japanese or European
companies on an equal basis at the global stage in terms of managing their own borrowing cost.
Global MNCs doing business in China could hence manage their overall interest rate risks in the
domestic currency RMB as well.

Due to this newly introduced capability for all the Chinese property mortgage borrowers to use
fixed rate mortgages which was introduced, launched by China Everbright (Guang-da) Bank in
January, 2006 and subsequently followed by many major commercial banks in China,
homeowners in China may get to avoid a similar subprime mortgage lending fiasco by relying on
transient low variable rates that happened in the US home mortgage markets. Although the RMB
lending rates have not moved sharply higher since then and the Chinese property market is
continuing to be pushed higher by short term variable borrowing rates, the low interest rate
environment may come to an end sooner or later and the credit-induced climb of the Chinese
property market may subsequently also come to a halt as a result.

With a timely development of the SwapRent (SM) transaction service for homeowners and the
SwapRent (SM) embedded HELM and FARM products in a new alternative complementary
housing finance system, banks and other financial institutions in the future may easily get to
escape the massive mortgage defaults and foreclosures that banks in places like the US, the
UK, Ireland and Dubai have encountered in recent years.

Ralph built and ran a successful Singapore-based derivatives trading/risk management
consulting and IT systems company in the 90's called ARMS (Advanced Risk Management
Solutions, Pte. Ltd.) which provided services over 26 countries covering the entire emerging
markets from Asia, Middle East to Central and Eastern Europe with a 4% global market share.
Counted among clients were many major stock exchanges, futures and options exchanges,
brokerage companies, banks and other financial institutions including central banks around the
regions.

ARMS' teams of financial engineers and traders would typically set up and run OTC derivatives
trading desks such as interest rate swaps and FX options through joint ventures with local banks
in the region. Ralph was an innovator, creator as well as a prolific writer, speaker and educator
that had helped shape the development of the financial markets in many of the Asian, Middle
Eastern, and Central / Eastern European emerging economies in the 90's. Among many of his
earlier academic publications and inventions, the VaR Derivatives and related new theories that
he created were of particular interests to the financial enterprise-wide risk management
community.

In his earlier years as a prominent derivatives banker in Asia, he was brought to Singapore from
New York by UBS while a Vice President in sales, trading and risk management. With the early
experiences gained on Wall Street, he successfully created many new innovative treasury
businesses based on structured derivatives for the Asian banking community. He then moved on
to be the Managing Director and Head of Structured Derivatives for Chase Manhattan Bank
based in Hong Kong to run the entire Asian derivatives business with many more financial
innovations and substantial business revenue results for the bank.

Ralph acquired his earlier training in financial derivatives and capital markets sales and trading
through working at many prestigious Wall Street institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Chemical
Bank (JP Morgan Chase now) and Equitable Life Assurance Society (AXA now), all based in
New York City.

Ralph received his MBA in 1987 from the Wharton Business School after he completed many
other graduate degrees and studies in computer information science and chemical engineering
from various top American universities (Penn, Michigan and Rice).

Ralph was born in Taiwan and holds both US and EU citizenships as well as an Australian,
Singapore, Hong Kong and China Permanent Residence. He speaks fluent Chinese and
understands basic Russian. He lives in Rancho de Liu in Southern California with his wife,
children & their Arabian horses.

Here below are partial lists of references.

Press, Magazine and Book Coverage