Reach-outs

- Finance and head of payments / payments leads. Operation leads don’t know
enough about the space.

Questions
- Intro - founder, cross border payments tech that sits in background - instant 24/7
settlement
FX, pre-fund, day to day operations, how interface to make payments
- We enable 24/7, instant, cross-border payments
so that treasury teams don’t have to use capital
to pre-fund accounts around the world.
- Pre-funding treasury - how much of an issue is
it? How much is the cost of capital?
- Interface - pre-fund accounts
- FX - rates, sources
- Company expands, more pre-funding, capital
- Sales lead, JD - looking at new biz or tech behind it? Who sell to?
- Monex, TransferMate, spent a lot of time around cross border and FX. Typically, how
much of the tech is built in house v external?
- Cost of FX rates, is company looking for alternatives?
- Pre-funding amount in bank accounts?
- Sales wise - verticals you target the most?
- Ripple?
- Settlement times
Lloyds ventures, small world -
- Off the ground, how?
- High level - operation OBs
Describe JD at company
- pre-funding
- Treasury - global payments, challenges of multi currency
- Where trying to optimise in treasury?
- Ripple
- What Nium’s priorities
- Give a broad overview of the payment rails you utilise to send cross border
payments.
- No. of instant, difficult payment corridors
- Treasury - SWIFT?
- Ripple - ODL who cares? Why not more adoption?
- Real time? Why not? Where blind spots?
- What do Nium compete on? Coverage, how position
- How do you integrate FX providers? FX process
 - Greatest demand in Nium
- Commercially, biggest cost centres in sending a payment. Margins?
- Ripple? XRP
- What % faster payments?
Where do you position yourself vs. a bank? What’s the rev/volume split between
banks and competitors (e.g. Wise) these days?
- Which customers tend to use banks, which tend to use competitors? Why
choose Veem over a bank? What differentiates you, where is value in biz?
- How are you reliant on banking infrastructure still? SWIFT?
- How is coverage and last mile coverage? Do you integrate directly or use providers?
- Which suppliers ripe for disruption>
- Is there demand from customers to make payments faster? What customers are
currently demanding?
- If payments rails were instant, would the backend process slow you down?
- Breaking down the cost of sending a payment, what are the ⅔ largest cost centres?
Are you looking to drive these down? Eg. for banks, it tends to be liquidity
nostros/vostros. FX etc
- What percentage of payments are real time cross border? What are the blockers?
- Difficult coverage areas?
- What things are important to Veem for staying competitive vs. Wise/banks/etc.?
- What are the most popular payment channels? (USD > EUR eg)
- Do you currently utilise blockchain technology? If so, for what/how?

Market segmentation
- Merchant level providers who serve global companies get requests to move large
volumes out of origin country to USD accounts (eg. ebanx from Brazil to
London/Singapore). Some may request in other currencies so FX fee is applied. Is
there an FX opportunity here?
- Global companies prefer local payments networks (eg. Airbnb in Brazil). Could
stablecoins mean less entity / local banking relationships?
- Remittance companies have to keep reserve funds in local banks in destination
countries. They must lock up capital (eg. Veem have raised $110M to date but have
tens of millions locked up in reserve accounts)

1. Companies that operate in multiple countries but do all payment processing in one
place. Might have to manage day-to-day cross-border flows
2. Companies that operate in multiple countries with subsidiaries in each country. They
don’t need to make cross-border payments day-to-day but will need to kick money to
HQ periodically
3. Companies that have to manage significant cross border flows as part of day-
to-day operation e.g. remittance businesses, ??
Karan @ Remitly
- Used to manage risk in previous jobs
- Does risk trading strategy and manages the currency accounts
- 2 kinds of partners
- Banking partner
- Disbursal partners typically smaller MTBs but could be banks
- Always partner with the best rate providers
- Post and pre-funding is used. Most are pre-funded
- Some countries don’t allow post-funding
- E.g. in India you have to send the money before they’ll disperse
- The most ideal situation is to move away from prefunding
- What do settlement times tend to look like?
- Cash management are the team that actually handle moving money
around
- Fees
- Varies from country to country
- Some partners will only work with them if they use their FX provider
- It’s a BD exercise.
- E.g. in latam the local money transfer companies have close
relationships with the banks and it’s hard to get independent FX rates
- No particular channel is too hard but they are all different
- E.g. In Russia you have to have a local office to operate and the local partners will rip
you off. It’s just a cost of doing business
- Cash management handle SWIFTs and money moves etc.
- They work with the banking partners when money hasn’t moved
- Banking partners are usually very quick to sort stuff but you just need to go
through the process
- An interesting thing for Karan was that we’d mentioned instant payments
- How do we fit into the web of remittance company <> banking partner <>
disbursal partner
- Smaller countries are difficult channels (SA, Botswana, Lesotho) because there are
fewer partners and less liquidity
- Being able to operate cheaply in countries where other countries can’t is a big win
- Blockchain/crypto is concerning to them. He would like to use it but his manager
would be a hard sell
- It’d be huge to be able to instantly move money and disburse money across
the world
- A lot of these countries will have out-of-market (illegal) channels where you can get
money in and out of the country
- He’s very interested in us and what we’re doing, wants to stay in touch

Douglas @ eBanx
- They have hubs and most of the flow happens between them
- They also do lots of payouts. A company might top up an account in the UK and
ebanx will send that money to Colombia to pay suppliers
- Usually they use SWIFT for those transactions
- Depends on the country as they have regulatory issues
- Argentina is the most difficult case from a regulatory perspective. They have
huge currency controls
- Douglas is in more of a strategic role instead of being involved day to day with
payments
- He does a lot of asset liability management
- Depends on the flow whether they
- They have a deal with merchants where they offer to pay them in 7 days giving them
enough time to sort the payment out and get the money moved
- For ebanx the flows are bigger going back from latam to the UK/Singapore/US
instead of the other way around.
- In Colombia and Brazil it’s hard to net flows
- Brazil, Argentina and Columbia have a regulatory framework
- In arg it’s very hard to send money abroad as it has to go via the central bank.
That can take 30 days. If you use crypto you can’t use the official
exchange rate in Argentina but you can do it
- You can’t have a USD account in Brazil and potentially Colombia and that means the
exchange rate is not convertible
- Chile, Peru and Mexico you can hold USD accounts
- In arg only 3 ways to get cash out,
- Official channel, takes weeks
- Buy a treasury in arg and then sell it in the US (contado col.?)
- Crypto is the final option
- Argentina is a special case in latam
- Brazil has an instant payment system but thinks that it’s probably the only one in
latam
- There’s way less trade flow between latam nations vs. Europe
- Ebankx are 100% reliant on banks for FX
- They typically have more than one bank in each country in order to add some
competition
- They worry about credit risk with new FX providers
- Thinks that there’s a big opp in latam but it’s tough because of regulatory stuff + trust
issues
- For companies like ebanx prefunding isn’t really a problem but the FX piece is
super interesting.
- If they need funding in any particular country they’re able to get funding
- 2 years ago they would have needed to look for new FX providers but now they’re
much better structured and priorities have changed
- Definitely an issue for smaller companies and banks are expensive for them
- Good to have more providers but the credit risk of a new partner might
outweigh the benefits
-
Don @ Stripe Treasury
Been with Stripe about three and a half years now and my current role in
my current role and I'm responsible for all of liquidity management at the
company. So that means globally ensuring that we've got the right funds in
the right place, in the right currency at the right time.

And to be able to make any, any user or corporate obligation payer that we
need to make. And so, you know, you can kind of think of that as managing
like a few asymmetries that occur when sort of, you know, processing, if we
just think of the user side processing payments and one is where typically
it's the kind of most common, the currency you cash is different from the
currency that you want to pay out.

So that basically introduces both some kind of liquidity and effects risk, and
that needs to be managed. And then there's location asymmetry that can
happen where the funds you've received in one place, but you actually
need to pay them out of another place. So this typically crops up in the sort
of cross border kind of sense when, when we start getting into that and
then, and then timing is the other mismatch that frequently has to be
managed depending on the user. And sometimes you may not actually
have the funds whilst prior to the pay it obligation arising in that case, then
you need to be able to come up with a funding solution for that payer, wait
for a settlement of the funds on your side. So I said, yeah, then doing that,
you know, I mean, prior to having the global role, I was responsible for not
just that, but you know, all aspects of treasury within the EMU region, we
were smaller then. So basically, you know, needed somebody to sort of
handle everything, start a team, and then build out our pillars so that we
could be a little bit more specialized analysis. How the I focused on the, or
my team focuses on the global liquidity management. Yeah.

There's there's about 8 in the liquidity team. Then we've got like adjacent
data science resources that are very embedded. And then of course the
adjacent and engineering resources as well, which are building, if you like
money movements, capability that, that the team averages to ensure that
we can kind of, you know, operate incomplete in a completely automated
and fashion, very much kind of committed to that zero touch principle
where you think should just, you know, flow through the system and people
are there if you'd like to build incremental, but you need to operate as well,
but that's on an exception basis and then build a incremental capability and
then across treasury more broadly because we have the liquidity
management pillar, but you know, there's treasury, but more roles than
bash, you know, responsible for managing the bottom sheet and the, the
company and ensuring that we've made the, the major cells to be robust to
any kind of financial stresses.

So we've got a capital management team takes care of that end of things.
And the capital markets team that faces off against the street. And some
should, we need to actually engage in any sort of interaction with banking
partners or otherwise to, you know, that sort of a lending facility in place or
letter of credit or things like that. That's the team that focuses on that piece,
obviously financial risk management arm, and then we layer in a strategy
and ops, but yeah, that's just sort of 30 people, you know, across the whole
thing.

Creating the right sort of reporting and observability of the funds that you
have coming in the associated forecasts with that. And then obviously on
the cash management, you've got your sources of cash and your uses of
cash. And then any mismatches you have on the three dimensions that I
mentioned earlier that need to be managed and you got your systems
basically identifying such mismatches and, and then to like appropriately
kind of, you know, generate instructions to bike apartments, or otherwise to
address them.

you need to thinking about having the appropriately appropriate liquidity

pools, that cost money, there are costs of business in place to be able to
fill, facilitate the settlements that you may want to do.

Say you want to sort of allow someone to acquire funds in the U S and
instantly pay it out in Singapore, you know, the worlds doesn't, you know, in
terms of how money moves. So listen, so that takes time. So if you want to
be able to enable that sort of user experience, and I'd be curious actually
on the user experiences that you're looking to build, but in order to solve for
that, you need to actually have funds obviously in Singapore. And it's like,
okay, well, where do I get those funds? How do I fund that? How do I make
sure that funding is costed appropriately in terms of the product that I have,
it's all very well creating the kind of user experience, but isn't one that is
appropriately risk managed and actually value a piece of, you know, in as
much as like getting the user basis. Interesting.

So when you talk about like a 24 7 cross border channel, so like, how do
you, like, how do you think about and creating something that, that works?
Like, there are some ideas out there, like, you know, that the, I mean that
the card networks have put out there, like say you pay it to card or
something like that, but if you think of like, no, actually I want to do, I want
to transfer funds from one bank account to another real time is not what
you're thinking about.

So, I mean, do you have timing risks there in terms of the volatility of
crypto?

So the idea would be that we would never hold crypto funds whatsoever
crypto assets whatsoever. And we would basically look to buy and sell
within a couple of seconds.

Yeah, I'm just saying that the volatility of crypto makes it sort of, I
think tricky, but it'll be interesting to see what more comes out of that.

So one of the challenges you've had with conversations, it's like, you know,
if, if I can move the money instantly. So it's like, okay, that's interesting.
What kind of risks am I taking along the way? And it's like, okay, which,
and so basically, which the institutions then would have the funds and
what will be the guarantees around those funds. So for example, you
know, risk managers that you would have, the treasury would typically do
counterparty risk assessments on anywhere that we were going to hold
funds or anybody that we were going to trade with those counterparty risk
assessments are, you know, relatively robust in the sense that, you know,
it's not just the financial wellbeing, but also the operational wellbeing.

And then you want to look through if you'd like and anything that they could
be doing with it in terms of, you know, the people that they rely on. And so I
would say that like, you know, the first thing that jumped out at me is
not been in the middle where we're going via some exchanges, like
how risky of those exchanges, but they just fall over, you know, or
can they just sort of take your payment and just hold it on sort of not
actually acting your instruction. So not sort of, so I don't know if the
treasurer is your first user, to be honest, because the treasurer is a risk
averse person, you know, that, that creates the right change.

Since companies you've got loads of people will do that growth on the site,
I say risky or whatever else, because it's the treasurer's job to be kind of
like the, the, the, sometimes for country voice, even though very often you
have to play the role. And it's like, I don't want to play this role. It's like,
actually, you already talked to me, but I must say if you ask the following
questions, so yeah, but that would be, so I might think about other types of
user first as you exploring this journey, because as I said that the treasury
user is had, at least in the traditional treasury would be risk averse,
you know, for very kind of maybe kind of the startup ecosystem, not more
risk appetite there, obviously they will be different in fields.

They won't be kind of, I wouldn't, you know, that there'll be folks who are
managing their funds once they probably wouldn't be thinking about it with
a treasury, a traditional, like a treasury lens or treasury ringer, they would
just be like, ah, we want to move on to here. They're okay. Let's do it.
Here's the marketing, we can partner with them. You know, some of
that those relationships could be successful in fruitful. Like, I don't
know. I mean, that's the exploration part of.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, in terms of, I guess the way I'm thinking about it is
like a treasury team that deals across border payments seems at least
seems to me to be slightly different set up to like your traditional treasury
team in the sense that you do seem like you do tend to have, like this pre-
funding mechanism where if you're wanting, you know, if you're a transfer
wise, for instance, you have to hold bank accounts around the world with
funds in them. So that you're able to pay out instantly is that kind of the
same model, you know, that Stripe will have to do where they hold tons of
different currencies and have to pay, you know, accept payouts or pay NS
in different different countries, or is it slightly different in that sense?

Your idea would satisfy. But the kind of immediate it is, is like dependency
in crypto seems like that could be a barrier given its volatility and given the
risk that comes with that. Whereas if we think about like, okay, can we
actually get payment systems to interact via fiat? It's like, okay, well I would
we get where it's like, well, there's one way. So you've picked up like, can
we get them to interact with your feet mitigate?
those ridiculous settlement times are all because we've got lots of
participants updating the ledgers

if there were instant rails where you could move money around quick and
the, you can't really could maybe forget the crypto side of it for a second,
but is that something that would be interesting?

Yeah, certainly like, I mean, if you can move more like reduces funding
costs it's, you know, like there's, there's a value to that in the sense that,
you know, you know, by having to hold liquid, to be in various places
around the world, to be able to facilitate pay it's where you've got a location
this much that has a cost. And then that cost obviously gets passed on to,
to end users. So the, if you like the advancement of the step, that
results in, you know, the ability to instantly kind of move around the
world really kind of reduces a lot of funding of liquidity costs.

And a lot of people depend on that because that's the other barrier to what
doesn't happen. Like, you know, where does that money come from? That
comes from financial lenders who are willing to lend short term and a yield
on it will be passed onto it. So kind of like, well, if that all goes away,
what happens to those to that business? It's like, well, it goes away as
well.

And so if you'd like, there are obviously a substantial kind of vested existing
interests that there always is prior to us, essentially innovation that
probably wants to the status quo to prevail

Martin @ Zai
- Been in payments 2-3 years
- Unless it’s a huge payment they use their own infrastructure
- Currently all prefunded
- Managed through Maquarie bank and they’re partnered with them to handle balances
and rates
- Volatile FX rates are a problem as you end up having to transfer funds around
- They’re currently looking at other partners to help them open up to more currencies,
using their balances
- Cost of capital and rates are an issue
 - One of the things they’re trying to achieve is build up a loyal following and part of
doing that is being able to offer as many pairs as coverage, this sometimes means
taking a lower margin
- It’s a very competitive market so you’re competing on price
- They’ve recently got some funding
- You can track prefunding requirements quite effectively
- At the moment higher value payments require advance payments
- As you grow it’s the same type of customer but you just have more of them
- What does it look like when you’re making payments?
- They have their own platform to manage payments that plugs into a number
of different banks
- They manage balances by looking
- Lots of this business is dependent on your ability to make realtime payments through
the banks
- I don’t think [realtime cross border payments] are that far away
- Ideally you want to take your own money off of the table
- In order to get your customer base up-and-running you’re not
- You’ve got to be competitive enough
- Not close enough to the ops side to be able to answer how the product should look
from an ops perspective
- There are some people in finance teams who are responsible for bank relationships,
they’re probably who we want to talk to

Travis @ Adyen
- Treasury at Adyen, manages payment flows across the world. Background in FX and
traditional treasury side. Treasury and payouts team. Manage payouts to merchants
around the world.
- Partnerships build relationships to pay out locally. Can’t easily payout cross border,
more expensive to do that.
- Adyen EU and US banking licence, UK in works.
- Regulatory and compliance around being PSP eg. Singapore, they want to make
sure funds are segregated between corporate and client.
- Pre-financing / pre-funding - going to pay out to merchants without receiving
settlement from the scheme. If you want T+2, where we get T+3, we are pre-
financing a day of volume.
- Pass through payout, we wait until we receive from the scheme. Sales-day payout,
we wait on the local payment rail, longer delay. Pay out 1 day sales, pre-defined.
- Are you concerned by pre-funding?
- Some geographies are closed loop, India is like this and complicated and cash gets
stuck. Sounds like more of a problem for merchants.
- Singapore - we pay in Singapore Dollars and scheme pays us in singapore dollars
- Middle East, schemes settle in dollars, we pay out in local currency.
- Previous role was FX - a lot of balance sheet hedging. In payments, like for like
removes most risk.
- FX piloting split settlements - someone buys from platform merchant, seller wants to
be settled in Czech Kroner, fee is charged in Euros.
 - Majority - every currency spot everyday. Looking to get it multiple times a day.
Doesn’t make sense trading APAC currencies in the afternoon in europe.
- Spot is bread and butter
- Looking at adding more banking partners for improvement for FX, not as price
sensitive. More growth stage right now.
- BRL lots of volatility, difficult to get cash out of country. Non deliverable forwards to
hedge.
- The smaller you are, the worse the price. Banks give coverage. If doing tens of
millions a day, quite close to the interbank. If thousands, markups from banks are
big. Eg. banks that have good APAC coverage. EUR, GBP, USD every bank can
cover. More exotic, we avoid hyper local banks, but use regional banks.
- Trading with banks, T+2, T+1 and same day for main pairs until cut off times for
settlement.
- Is there an operational element to settle instantly?
- Depends on risk tolerance, if funds flowing one direction, depending on
volumes makes sense to do it quickly. IF going both ways, sometimes it's bad
to settle instantly because trades can swing during the day. Advocate for
reducing amount of times you trade.
- £10K in EUR to GBP, this gets pricing. Adyen won’t trade. 100 bips or worse.
- FX is 24/5 not 24/7.

James @ bill.com
- Most companies will start with one liquidity partner via swift
- Slowly build up partners around the world and start moving payments via
local partners
- Price comes down as you’re better able to demand competitive rates on the
corridors you need
- Tried doing exactly what we’re doing when he was at Veem in 2014
- Apis broke all the time, companies too green
- Not enough liquidity
- Lots of companies came to them as they were doing it outside of bank
channels and in theory were cheaper
- As it turned out they never moved more than 5-10% of their business via
crypto
- Didn’t see prefunding as a problem but that might be a bill.com specific thing
- He can’t see why bill.com would use us, their need to transact out of hours is quite
minimal
- If you can net off all of your business that’s ideal as it means you don’t need to do
any FX at all
- They can do global transfers for 10 bips via their US banking partner
- Didn’t really see the benefit of what we’re doing and didn’t really see much value in
the RTP aspect of it all
- At coke they had a problem with intra-africa trade where you couldn’t trade between
pairs of African currencies and had to go via dollar
- Could be a space for us to look at
 - He’s currently working on getting customers to use their international payments
product, when he’s done with that he’ll be working on making it more sophisticated
- Very keen to check in with us later and said we can get in touch with him at any time

Olukunle @ Flutterwave
-
- Prefund accounts in 10 countries across Africa but the business is across US and
Europe as well
- Handle transactions of many different types
- A lot of the problem comes down to routing transactions
- He currently uses spreadsheets & databases to manage
- Which way do net flows go?
- It’s a risky

Kreena @ Azimo
- Prefunding
- Centralised or decentralised ops models
- Either HQd or have operations across the world
- In terms of prefunding, it’s cost and speed
- Cost in terms of where do you get the money from
- Depending on where your ops are, can take a few days for prefunding
payments to land
- Lots of other variables
- SWIFT is the main way to send those payments around - It’s safe and easy
- Depends on volume - typically you wouldn’t be able to send internationally
using anything other than swift
- SWIFT
- SWIFT is very desirable as it’s safe
- Are timing restrictions, can’t send money at weekends or on national holidays
- Cost
- Lots of considerations around taking credit lines, cost, time period
- “So many factors that you need to consider when you’re prefunding”
- “Prefunding was one of the biggest jobs that I used to do”
- You need balance transparency
- It depends on your model but you can always think about ways to bring cash back
- Depending on who owns those final bank locations
- It’s all about balance management at the end of the day
- Trapped cash
- Wrong instructions are a big one
- “It’s just a case of how you manage it at the end of the day”
- They don’t net off their flows
- Need tools in place to let you manage
- +1 to API
- “It’s quite out there but it’s
- “If you can do this instantly, that’d be amazing”
- Make sure your reporting is rock solid and you hit the bases for what users want
- Look to expand your FX coverage
- Look at how people can get their cash in/out

Dan Bronstein @ TransferGo

- Past 3 years, x-border payments. 2 year TransferGo, EMQ for last year B2B
payments.
- TransferGo ran a network team - external relationships cards, banks, cards,
ripple, sat by me.
EMQ focus on payments to Asia, cash, e-wallets, and selling into Revolut
(wholesale)
- EMQ leaving to do EU sales.
- B2B challenges - depends on type setting. If a huge multinational, £30 for
SWIFT, wholesale FX 2-10 bips, no problem. SME’s who are domestic and a
few international payments, not much of a problem. It’s not a huge challenge
impacting bottom line.
- More interesting use cases - mid size workforces - eg. Deel - EMQ have not
solved. Most exciting bit - do more international flow and get ripped off by
banks. If fintech in London, dozens of options.
- Payments + documentation requirements in some countries
- Remittances > B2C. Advise against, crowded, low margin.
- Pre-funding problem across the board
- Some companies will extend credit, can’t do that if VC backed. Very
established startups who can get debt financing or big corporates.
- Ask clients to pre-fund at EMQ
- Ripple - we will give you pre-funding of £2m as sweetener.
- Ticket size relevant but not important, secondary. Where is there actual
problem to solve? £100k tickets doesn’t seem big enough problem.
- Won’t solve for cost like SWIFT, what might be able to solve for is speed.
- One exception on / off ramps for crypto exchanges £100k, people won’t want
to wait.
- Exceptions in exotic market - pay via SWIFT is easy. To collect money from
exotic market is challenging.
- If collect money from Japan/China, you are unique in fintech. Early stage of
evolution.
- PSD2 in Europe makes it simple, same rulebook. Asia not same, each
country has different rules. No commonalities,
- Brunt work in countries to collect money from these countries pain.
- SEPA area which includes other currencies - don’t think have a hope of
getting there first.
- I’d be very surprised if Wise aren’t at forefront of tech innovation and T+1.
- At TransferGo, biggest issue - corridors we had v popular loyal customers -
cracking into new corridors is impossible. £1M + on marketing.
- Look elsewhere in world, opportunity is.
 - TransferGo - currencycloud, thunes, nium. Local providers we had focus. Gap
in Scandinavian fines - bank fines, fintechs moved out. Instant payment
system to cover Nordics which is going live. Black hole at TransferGo for it.
- P27 is the system, local fiat clearing system in Scandi. We would do
- Closer TG got to banks, the better service we got.
- Treasury and FX - wasn’t really hedging.
- Currencycloud and NIUM already offer real time 24/7. Limited by local ACH.
- Old boss at TG was chief commercial officer,
- The way these are setup - you have Ops team, you have a network team
which owns and precures, banking and infrastructure team, network team.
Job is to acquire bankable, visa, mastercard, banks. Local teams in each
country eg. Turkey, Ukraine, Polish speaker etc so much easier.
- Ripple?

2 versions. Initially, we will replace SWIFT xCurrent - we won’t move money, but we
will be messaging provider but cheaper. TG we used Ripple in India, some success there,
users and client on other side of trade, xCurrent. This was challenge. “Hey Axis bank, ripple
have made API update, can you accommodate?” Answer was no.

Making tech innovative not as important as money transfer seamless, reliable. If it

goes down occasionally, cannot be used.

SLA absolutely priority, need to give guarantees. More interesting piece, xRapid, transition
XRP > GBP to IRL, someone is market making in both areas, don’t have to wait for
messaging, need functional liquidity. Still need off ramp.

The challenge - arms trading, black market stuff, financing drugs, not easy for everyone to
accept. We are trading via XRP in India. Big financial institutions now interested.

Not actually instant settlement, relies on ACH rails. Mexico / US > biggest and most efficient
market. Philippines, India.

The challenge is not tech, getting real time into fiat. Winning over commercial relationships,
getting comfortable in and out of crypto.

Francisco @ Moneytrans

Russell @ Nium
- Money movement isn’t interesting
- They’ve already done it. They’ve secured local bank accounts in country and
they prefund. Prefunding just isn’t a problem for them
- They have a Ripple partnership which they use for some stuff
- They only use Ripple in about half a dozen countries
 - Banned in lots of SE Asia
- Still need a crypto-friendly bank to work with you
- Prefunding is capital intensive
- Nium are able to extend our reach in latam and Southeast Asia
- They have Brazil and Mexico
- Also do Argentina, Colombia
- They are beginning to start to work with crypto businesses
- Have published a crypto policy
- They’ve got circle and bitpay lined up to support things
- They are courting a few of the big names (Coindesk, binance, etc.)
- We don’t want to be scrabbling around in the weeds picking up shady players
- They want established businesses that can bring them flow instantly
- They’re already having conversations with exchanges where they want access to
local markets and
- They aim to have multiple banks in every jurisdiction to avoid the situation where a
bank changes their mind and you end up having to shut the route down
- Why don’t banks want to work with crypto?
- Regulatory issue is number 1 for banks
- Issue 2 is this opaqueness around lots of the crypto space (will be fixed when
1 is fixed)
- Banks are traditional and if they get into crypto they are giving away loads of
margin
- E.g. swift where they don’t want to give that business away to the crypto
crowd
- Banks move slow
- The idea of a bank risking their licence to lose margin and add risk is crazy
- Africa is the interesting place to look at right now as their banking infra sucks and the
trad finance situation there is miserable (inflation, shonky govts. etc.)
- Over the next year or two, our crypto policy will get more defined and probably open

Tanya @ Deel
- US/Europe everything moves pretty smooth
- APAC & Africa on the other hand, the connectivity is way worse
- No global banks present in lots of Asian countries
- Nigeria and Kenya are actually pretty well connected
- Citi do about 3tn in transactions on a daily basis
- Rwanda/Uganda the connectivity is actually way worse
- Even if you have an account in Uganda/Rwanda you still need a physical presence to
- Took 5 days to settle FX payments into Norway, not even JPM knew where the
money went
- If they have a core banking partner they keep 1.2x forecast cash to cover local
payouts
- If it’s a local banking partner they keep 2.2x
- Speed is important but reliability is more important
- Right now they just have to plan around the issue of regional holidays
 - E.g. yesterday there was a bank holiday in Indonesia
- Having everything all in one place would be great
- Wise is pretty good in this regard as you can see all your exposure
everywhere
- Do want to move away from prefunding
- Kenya payments break all the time
- Coverage is really important
- Currently building their own in-house treasury tool
- They want to move towards a world in which they just work with their banking
partners and are less reliant on PSPs
- Face a lot of issues with NIUM
- Lots of their Africa payments are going out via Nium
- Rates are bad + technical issues
- Going to end their contract with them
- Using them for payins
- dLocal are better in terms of reliability
- The most important thing is reliability & transparency

Nick @ SmallWorld
-

Kerim @ Azimo
- Mainly customer facing role
- You’ll have local partners
- They prefund in USD accounts in Pakistan
- Every 15 minutes they convert GBP to USD (batch transactions)
- Then you’ll send it to Pakistan and use that balance to pay customers out
- Key thing is that they’ll be doing two conversions, one to USD and then one to
the local currency
- Very competitive when it comes to rate.
- Wise offer great rates and are very clear about their fees
- When it comes to payment ops, what are they trying to do
- They run a Jira board
- Operationally it’s hard
- Not sure if payments can be improved using existing payment rails e.g. bank
transfers + email FX quotes
- Ripple isn’t a stable solution. At least 2-3x a month they’ll have an issue that impacts
customers
- The Ripple integration is a good option but it’s not a must
- Doesn’t solve any real world problems
- One of the benefits is speed
- Currently using it for Thailand and Philippines
- Their partner in Thailand and Sri Lanka can settle funds in sub 5-mins
- Unclear what token is getting exchanged apparently not USD or XRP
 - Ripple have their own partner in the local currency and you end up integrating
into their system
- You end up having to use their banks and PSPs if you want to use Ripple
- It’s much easier to prefund in the Philippines where your partner will handle all the
conversion vs. Ripple
- Wouldn’t bother integrating with Ripple if he started a fintech today
- Often you get bribed to use Ripple but doesn’t think it’s worth using Ripple
- If you want to build something backend based you’ll just end up as just another
Ripple
- In my opinion, this isn’t needed
- Ripple gives you no status updates when a tx gets processed by Ripple and
when it gets sent to the banking system. Txes can get stuck in the processing
phase with no feedback given
- Ripple rates vs. banks
- Ripple can be ⅓ the cost of banks for txes into the Philippines.
- £1.70 in fees using the banks vs £.70 if you’re using Ripple
- Very hard to compete with Worldremit, Wise, Remitly if you want to go b2c
- The question they get all the time is “where is my money?”
- Tons of things that can go wrong on the payment side that they have no
control over
- Trustly has issues with lots of Nordic banks
- With solutions like zofort, trustly, things can get pretty bad
- Payments can get delayed when sending payments from specific banks in Spain

Yoni, Head of treasury @ Wise

- They’re not dealing with payroll, invoice payments etc.
- Treasury is a product team at Wise
- Part of what they do is figure out whether to prefund with cash/credit/etc.
- On the corporate finance side there aren’t that many options, could be cash, equity,
debt, credit lines, etc.
- Alternatively you might have a payment agreement with a partner
- Debt is the easiest way to solve this problem
- In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a costly problem to solve
- WU have 3nb of debt on their books, Wise have about 10% of that but running the
same volume
- They can scale
- “There might be very elegant solutions to this but the need to be dirt cheap is
more important”
- The cost of debt capital for them is less than half of what it was 3 years ago, not all of
that is driven by interest rates
- This isn’t necessarily driven by rates
- Probably easier for a fintech today to borrow from Barclays etc. than it was 5
years ago
- A very small shop wouldn’t be able to raise debt so will end up using
expensive VC money
 - They can source some debt from service providers
- Checkout.com, Adyen, etc. would definitely lend to you as part of the
commercial agreement
- JPM have been peddling their coin for a while for instant money movements
- Has been looking at it for a while but not clear that it solves any problems for
them
- Using their own coin doesn’t seem to scale super well
- Barriers are regulatory in part, not super clear who owns the coins
- Will it be HQLA compliant in Australia
- They will need to charge and that’s concerning when you need to build on it
- Ripple
- He’s friends with Danny, the head of their UK ops
- If they had a different leadership team they might be in a different place
already
- Their idea and tech is reasonable
- They’re jumping the gun, manipulating the price of their token way too much
for anyone to take them seriously
- Has a business card from 2013 and they were giving out XRP
- They put old-school bankers into their leadership and ended up with a
business trying to build itself on top of insider information and relationships
- When you’re thinking about customer funds and other emoney requirements you
have to remember that you need to be overcollateralized vs. a bank that can hold 5%
- They can’t get govt. Insurance like the banks can. Is some private insurance but it’s
very expensive for smaller companies and even for wise it’s still only borderline worth
it
- There are so many regulatory regimes around the world and many places don’t even
have customer safeguarding rules
- FX is always a challenge, not super expensive for them but still a big one
- Rates
- Display rates are mainly from execution providers (XE etc.)
- In some countries they show a local rate from local institutions
- Execution
- You can imagine an iteration from using currencycloud, then using a
local partner, then having a bank account then having multiple bank
accounts, then final iteration is connecting with local payment rails
- The problem for Wise is that the FX is connected to the actual
payment. You have to trade with the partner that’s doing the
disbursal which makes it more expensive
- In those cases small transactions can go to the local provider and then
use SWIFT for the bigger ones
- Ideally we’d be able to do 24/7 RTP vs. SWIFT
- In theory UK banks can do up to £2m via FPS but most banks only
allow only 25k
- Liquidity isn’t usually the issue when it comes down to slowing
payments
- “Of course if there’s immediate settlement everywhere, that’s great”
- You are seeing lots of payments going through international card rails
which means that the settlement problem becomes theirs
 - Thinks that cards might replace bank accounts in many
jurisdictions
- Ops is the highest cost for payments (onboarding, KYC, AML), for
recurring payments the actual FX cost, spread and bank fees are quite
minimal
- On average FX costs us 5 bips plus another couple of bips of bank fees,
normally around 7 bips on major corridors
- It’s higher on exotic channels e.g. India but it’s still only about 8-10 bips in FX
fees. They’ve got several partners there so there’s competition and fees stay
low as a result.
- If you have good certainty of your volumes you can use forwards to
make it much cheaper
- If your direction is selling things to treasury teams, it is a hard sell.
What I don’t see enough is companies with proper data capabilities.
They don’t just say we can solve a problem, they give a way for
potential customers to simulate exactly what it would look like if they
used your product.
- So far Wise haven’t bought anything, they’ve built it all as no one’s
sold anything well enough
- Was talking to an FX management company and even they weren’t
able to provide simulations of how it would look
- Is an angel investor and is trying to help people building in the space. Very
happy to keep in touch and give us guidance

Tim @ Stripe
- Worked for Apple, now Stripe
- Angel invests and also does some VC investing
- How are we planning on segmenting target customers?
- SME/enterprise/midlevel?
- Sounds like we need to come back with a bit more of a sales strategy
- “You can reverse engineer your product from the segment you’re targeting”
- Said that we’re looking at providing an API product as that seems to be what the
people we’ve spoken to so far say
- Didn’t really come back to me on that
- We’ll find it very difficult wading into SE-Asia and trying to get business from the
100ks of SMEs there
- Doesn’t seem to really get the remittance business
- Extensive experience in Vietnam at apple
- young , motivated population
- Lots returning from the diaspora to start digital businesses
- Hard regs there, chaotic
- Millions of SMEs which are where the innovation is happening
- How are we going to target them?
- Keen to chat to us both again
 - Seems very keen to give us advice, not sure he really understands much about the
mechanics/ops side of payments
- Not the right person to chat to re. Selling to stripe although said he’d have a think
- Don’t have much faith in this, I get the impression that he’s extremely far
away from the teams that would actually use our product

Mike @ OFX
- It’s not a no but I can’t see where the advantage would be right now
- They add spread to interbank and that’s how they make their money
- Say we want to move UK to Singapore

Toby @ Moneycorp
- This falls under the payment solutions banner
- Might not be able to touch cryptocurrencies at all.
- The US company has been able to dabble but in the UK they can’t right now.
- They’ll pass us on and let us know what the head of payment solutions says.
-

Freetrade
- Were using currencycloud but now using 360T
- CC are full service (they handle everything)
- Very expensive and sometimes can’t handle the volume
- Other end is a direct-to-bank relationships
- 360T are a multibank platform that lets them trade between banks
- CC give you one rate and you have to take it
- In a few quarters they’ll be going d2b
- 360T netting solution has always been quite nascent and hasn’t been a good
use case for
- Right now minimum time to get cash to the US is 1 day
- Their float would run out in 15 minutes if they couldn’t get cash to the US
- Takes at least a day over the weekend
- Compliance takes on stablecoins
- We don’t know it
- We don’t know what the FCA is going to say about it
- After Luna we don’t bring it up any more
- We should keep a look at the FCA digital asset licence page
- Majority of stuff they’re approving is b2b, not b2c
- If we need a licence we should get it submitted asap
- Things move too slow over here, you’re going to have a better time trying to
operate in Brazil etc. They also have a much more pressing use case
- If they could bring us in as a backup provider they would.
 - Would use us in case of emergencies
- Wouldn’t necessarily hold funds with us
- Right now trades have to be submitted by 10am to get a same-day FX trade
- They still get a better rate turning cash into USD and buying crypto vs. buying in the
native currency
- Their model is to collect 1.5%
- CC charging 15k a month minimum
- 360T charging 6k a year flat fee
- The biggest problem right now is banking hours
- Cost
- If float runs to zero they can no longer execute trades. This is the worst case
- Keeping money as a buffer they’re exposed to FX and it’s a small price to pay
- Having said that treasury team will argue they need as much capital
as possible
- Right now there are currently no other options
- If we need to get money to paxos at 1000 on saturday morning cost doesn’t
matter
- If you charged a higher price in terms of bips we’d still get used in emergency
situations but we wouldn’t be used for day-to-day
- CC won’t allow them to net and ended up trying to charge them 100k a month which
is clearly no good

Jason @ Routefusion
- Came to routefusion after getting frustrated with limitations of the product at OFX
- I have a client that has all this USD, I’m sick of dealing with corpay etc., I just want to
tie into one and let them
- Do we want to be another one of their partners?
- Yes
- Do you prefund?
- I’m not sitting on a huge treasury account that they’re extending to customers
- Their customers are any global company who needs to do global payments who
might otherwise go to corpay/etc.
- Emerging markets
- I wanna flip this over to a couple of people
- “We always want to be on the radar of different payment options”
- “I think we’re doing something in the treasury space around hedging so there might
be an opportunity there”

Campbell @ LMAX
- 2018 launched 24/7 crypto trading
- Number of different types of LPs
- On the FX side it’s major t1 banks and prop trading shops
- They’re using those partners to make them a market in some FX pairs
- Crypto crosses are too wide to use crypto pairs
- Those synthetic spreads are better during the week
 - There are other issues e.g. with dollar yen there are exchange restrictions
when it comes to trying to move money out of Japan
- Some of their weekend volume is powered by crypto pairs
- Right now the spreads are too wide for institutional to be interested
- They don’t really do deliverable FX, almost all institutional
- Deliverable FX is a very different business to institutional. It requires having a
load of blokes on the phone talking to corporates
- All revolut do is put a massive charge on FX over the weekend to cover the risk
- “You guys need to come to market with a product that’s super tight

Paul Unterberg @ Paypal

- Paxos is their primary LP and custodian but also have secondaries
- Paxos handle everything to do with crypto accounting and ledgering
- They have an FX engine to handle turning customer money into dollars to send to
Paxos
- FX operates 24/7
- If you’re trying to
- Execution currencies vary, not always USD
- Hinted that paypal are using crypto to settle internally
- Segment your fintech targets into bigger and smaller players
- Bigger players are likely to have figured out a good way to do most things
- The hard thing they’ve found about doing transfers is the compliance and
regulatory stuff
- Think about how we’re going to model it. Are we going to use an omnibus
solution. If you are you need to be very clear to the regulator about how
you’re segmenting everything and how the charges are going to work for the
user
- Have a look at how
- It’s a big problem if you’re pokerstars and you’re HQd in the isle of man and trying to
take currencies around the world
- How can customers deposit/withdraw funds without it all being eaten away via
FX fees
- The card schemes offer a useful way to get currency around the world even if
they cost loads
- People are just happy to pay the fees as there are so few other options
- Moonpay can’t really compete with paypal when it comes to rails
- What it comes down to is accept rate.
- Tried to pay on apple pay but moonpay transaction got blocked as they’re still
- Paypal’s crypto mission is to become the bridge between fiat and crypto worlds
- Going back to segmentation
- Look at SMBs that are going crossborder
- Crypto-first companies probably don’t care
- For whatever reason

Colin @ FullFX
 - Slowly towards 24/7 FX, don’t be fooled by LMAX. 99.9% of weekend trading are
trading by hedging.
- Problem for 24/7 FX no infrastructure at all. Banks not there, CLS doesn’t operate at
weekends.
- Sensitive subject at moment, regulators. CLS industry wide. 1976, a German bank
failed. All of the US banks lost their money. 26 years later, CLS formed.
- CLS is all about netting because notionals are so high. BIS.org - paper on settlement
risk 2019. 60% FX trades not being made payment vs payment.
- Global foreign exchange division - best practices in place last month.
- Get companies to deliver instructions at the weekend, trusted counterparty like CLS.
- Baton Systems trying to use DLT for settlement and risk.
- Look at hedging and execution firms that work with SMEs - AssureHedge in Ireland,
white label execution. They have trading volume, they send to SMEs bank 5 by 8
basis.
- Brokers are more facilitators
- Deustche Bank corporate bank
- Revolut have wholesale FX so can mark up FX at weekends
- Not trained in FX, uninformed flow. Need to do flow at weekend, give me a rate.
- Clearing FX chat around 10 years but hasn’t happened. Counterparty credit risk,
spreads on US banks expanded by 0.1% but clearing costs more still. They want
specific trades, pairs on a date. Equity model
- What will change is what happens after the trade - T+2. Inefficiency costs institutions
a lot of money right now. Banks working with Baton, CLS Net are attempting the
same thing.
- FX exchange thrives in crisis, push to make more listed but failed. Spreads are thin
so efficiency is key.

Laura @ TradeRepublic
- As a euro company they’re using european brokers/custodians
- They have settlement issues with crypto settling 24/7
- They don’t have much of an FX problem as they’re settling everything in europe
- They are providing equity and crypto trading
- They’re
- Need to get cash to providers t+1 for equity settlement but crypto is obviously
different
- Right now they’re working with providers in the middle to allow them to buy/sell
crypto
- Key for them is making sure that they are maintaining security and settlement
requirements across crypto and equities
- They need to
- Need to bridge the technology and market structure requirements if you want to trade
both securities and crypto
- Trading hours, speed, settlement is different in every way
 - The post-trade world is completely different but the customer doesn’t want to
know anything
- Post-trade world for securities is terrible
- It’s very manual
- Blockchain tech will change a lot of this going forward
- Blockchain has a big advantage for securities that aren’t traded so often
- There are securities directly issued on blockchains but don’t think that in the
next 5 years shares are going to be issued on blockchains
- Possibility for staking and yield is interesting
- Customers who really want to own crypto aren’t really their customers
- Looking at customers who want to save and invest for a long time
- Their customers are experienced in the market but they don’t want them gambling
- Having diversified ETF style crypto definitely makes sense and will help them
bring crypto to the masses in a way that they’re happy with

Jonathan @ Status
- Clients come to them because they struggle to open bank accounts in other places
- They have a custodian in HK
- They’ve developed an API to make the user experience very smooth
- They aren’t speculative’
- They’re in the payments space and make money from FX margins on customer
payments
- Want to move (when they’re licensed for fintech) to deal with crypto
- Singapore is more crypto friendly
- They’ve already been approached by a company in the crypto space but it’s difficult
as they need to find a way to make money on the payments side, not the crypto
trading side
- Client eventually will ebay and sell crypto for their payments needs
- They would be able to quote at the weekend but
- For cross-border payments they just tell customers to wait until the next working day
- The only way they can settle over the weekend is by doing internal transfers
- Would what we’re doing be interesting to your customers?
- Some might be interested but they’ll need a good rate
- It could be interesting but I don’t see the huge value for now for customers
- Some of them might be interested but I know for a fact that we don’t have any
trouble saying to customers that their payment will settle next day
- They would be interested in starting the project once they’ve checked that there’s
value to the customer
- Next steps: talk to marketing team to see whether there’s value to customers
- Timing: will talk today to the marketing team
- If they get enough positive responses they’ll start moving forward to looking at
implementation
Christian - COO @ FellowPay

- Started last year - do have customers who need money super fast to cover finances.
 - Use SWIFT for payments
- Danish bank for cross border payments, use Wise.
- Make transactions as fast as possible is biggest priority, transparency is also key
- They will have crypto in future
- No need for extra coverage

Marcelo @ dlocal
- When you look at the cross border payment process, moving money is the hard bit
- Usually you have to rely on banks and 3p and they don’t have the level of
sophistication that you do
- It ends up being very manual and adds to BO burden
- As you grow you really need to add more resources
- Depending on payment types, regions, etc.
- The world is becoming more complex and it’s getting harder to operate around the
world
- Dlocal doesn’t have the focus to solve for all of these payment problems everywhere
- You need to choose carefully who you work with
- The philosophy for them is that the company doesn’t have a risk appetite for lending
to customers
- Dlocal have too many things to care about other than lending to customers
- Uber have lots of cash and were trying to use dlocal as an optimisation engine but
dlocal couldn’t do that
- Also couldn’t do arbitrage, just not set up to help people do that
- We sell t+7-10. They don’t have a line of credit in countries
- We need to add two or more things to this to make this useful

Nishil @ Lightyear
- Revolut already had an FX business and they’d basically solved for that
- Everyone is using currencycloud for virtual currency accounts
- Currencycloud routes money to brokers around the world as required
- Most people have a drivewealth or alpaca as a broker partner in the US
- Wise are trying to build a more competitive currencycloud
- Currently takes an hour for sterling deposits
- Customers expect instant
- Weekend settlement is terrible with currencycloud
- Currently looking to partner with LHV Bank in Estonia
- They’re offering a product for equity brokerages
- Been looking at Genesis to power their crypto stuff
- It’s tough for brokerages to swallow the FX fee but eventually that has to be passed
on to the customer
- It’d be very beneficial if you could build an FX-free
- There’s a cost associated with working with cc but it grows with scale and becomes
unsustainable to not charge forit
 - Some of the most interesting markets are nordics/baltics from a brokerage
perspective
- CC are not good for local support in those regions
- Solution is ok for Euro but starts to get really expensive
- How does CC suck?
- If it’s a bank holiday in the UK you can’t deposit
- Weekend deposits aren’t processed until Monday
- The commercials around non-euro countries look quite aggressive
- In general they’re ok
- Not sure if they’re set up from a reg point of view to support crypto
- You always launch with bank transfers first, then open banking then cards
- It’d be nice to have one provider for all money moves, right now they have
loads
- Talking to Adyen and currently using Truelayer
- Currencycloud is set up as an EMI. Problem is that it’s very difficult to offer SIPPs
and ISAs on top of that
- FCA just won’t allow it, claim that it’s not properly safeguarded
- Wealthkernel API quality wasn’t there and they don’t have US rails
- They have all the right tools but for some reason just haven’t really
- “Totally a need for drivewealth for Europe”
- Upvest are about the only competitor
- Most painful user journey is that there needs to be some kind of name check when
you first make a deposit. The name check doesn’t happen on the CC side until
Monday am
- Agreed some kind of prefunding model/pay currencycloud
- At revolut had teams dedicated to managing cash and optimising capital
- They’re too small right now to have a full treasury team
- Their ops guys are treasury guys
- Their broker Alpaca has struck up a partnership with a crypto firm

Igor @ Fiserv
- Igor and Ben

David @ Gotrade
- Can’t do non-Indonesian equities in Indonesia so they’ve had to be creative
- Singapore probably not going to be licensed
- Philippines
- They’ve started well but looking to move beyond a long-only equity product
- Really interested in the 24 hour stuff
- Spoke to a firm called Blueocean
- They cover the 8 hours between market close and market open
- They’re currently using Citadel
- They can do 24/5.5 stock trading
- They capture FX at the client side and monetise it
- They’re currently using Rapyd for FX on deposits and withdrawals
- They have a USD P&L product with equities and on the crypto side a potential IDR
exposure as well that’s accounted in the local currency
- They are linked into Alpaca, spoke to drivewealth and Apex (continue to chat to
Apex)
- They are their biggest client on the retail side by far
- Legal differences meant that they couldn’t work with drivewealth, DW wanted them to
get licensed everywhere
- What are you looking to solve for?
- On the funding side
- Instant deposits and withdrawals are important. They’re currently
using Alpaca prefunded float to power this
- For withdrawals they do something similar with a prefunded float at
Rapyd
- They get daily rates from Rapyd. This is convenient but does mean
that there are times during the day when they aren’t competitive
- Important for customer trust to move money instantly and has driven
more signups
- They do a lot of volume at the weekend. They lock in a friday rate from
Rapyd and that’s good for the weekend.
- None of their competitors get the seamless onboarding right e.g. td
ameritrade, moomoo
- Wise doesn’t work as well, flow is clunky and requires that you go
through a wise-branded bit. They haven’t really built for their core
markets
- On Rapyd
- Rapyd receive IDR and use their floats to manage flows between USD and
SGD
- What we really need to do (particularly in Indonesia) is offer more payment methods.
They have a few rails and ewallets but lots of them are bad
- The only fractional product they have right now is USD
- They are looking at building out crypto
- They could integrate something like zerohash into alpaca
- Difference with Indonesia is that
- What’s interesting about the FTX model is that they’re looking at building out
capabilities in the fractional equities side
- The RH market cap is less than the cash they have on hand
- FTX have partnered with embed (similar to Alpaca)
- Interesting to see how they go from crypto into equities vs. the other way
round which is what everyone else has done
- One of the problems that RH have tried to solve is the issue of not being able to
move crypto after you’ve purchased it
- There are going to be some big margins in Asian countries when it comes to
currency trading and they want to be able to undercut their competition
- What are the main things they really care about re. payments?
- The FX rate is vital, has to be competitive
- Having a more dynamic rate is probably useful
- They need to figure out how they can get money to us
 - Rapyd have incredible capabilities in US and Europe and have started to deliver well
in Indonesia
- What they’ve found is that retail customers sometimes seem to use them more like a
remittance business instead of an investment platform
- “It becomes really interesting when people are able to see live rates 24/7 and can
exchange cash whenever they want”
- IG learned the hard way that if you want to offer a crypto product you need to staff
over the weekend
- 30% of their crypto revenue comes from saturdays and sundays
- They used their weekend team to provide pricing via the futures market at the
weekend
- Shouldn’t be too hard for the forex market to do something similar
- Should be relatively easy to manufacture crypto synthetics, why has no one does it?
- Staffing is still a big challenge for running a 24/7 shop. Finding people, keeping them
motivated and managing risk is all a big issue
- More traditional CFD firms probably not interested
- Trading 212 should be interested
- Group CEO at eurotrader would be an interesting one for us to chat to. Has
deep fx experience. Marceo Espina (?)

Alex @ Global Reach

- It would be a very small subset of their clients that would be interested in what we
have to offer
- They have 3 segments in their client base
- Private clients - individuals that are buying/selling property abroad/moving
abroad/getting disbursements from foreign investments. Might be some
interest but the volume won’t be massive
- Corporates - Servicing SMEs up to FTSE 100s across all sectors £50-500m
are the bulk of their customers. Not sure how much interest they’ll have is
because they’re CFOs who are working there and not sure how many of them
are working
- Institutions - Servicing all financial clients. Might be some interest there
resulting from M&A stuff. If they’re signing the papers today and they’re a UK
fund buying a US business there’ll be a 12 week completion period. They’ll fix
the rate over that 12 week period.
- Probably not loads of customers
- Interesting piece might be the PSP model. They have a payments division where
they provide mass payments capabilities to other PSPs. It might be an interesting
one for them.
- Why don’t people trade FX over the weekend
- If we could get pricing on a Saturday I’d still pitch it to a client as long as
they’re happy with it
- No one has asked for weekend FX trading
- Can’t say much more about the PSP part of the business
- Limited demand for this in the corporate FX world
 - They’ve done quite a lot in the travel business and can find out what they do in the
travel business

Sahil @ NIUM
- B2b, p2b, b2p, p2p payments
- “We are everywhere, all collection and payout markets”
- The banks are the main players in this market but the problem is that they charge
large fees

Oya @ VertoFX
- EMI licensed here, 70 in the UK, engineering hub in India and a load of people
working in Africa
- Most businesses don’t transact on the weekend
- There’s no advantage to me to be able to make payments
- For remittance it looks useful
- If our customers need to purchase goods from a supplier they can always wait until
monday before sending money
- Might be different for ecomm but it’s really dependent on the industry
- In some corridors they have a prefunding model but others they postfund where the
LP allows it
- The ideal would be to have floats sitting in each country so there are no frictions
when you need to move money
- SA, Kenya, Nigeria and the UAE are tough markets to crack but great if you can do it
- They do lots of GBP USD which is prefunded and it would be interesting if they could
do it without prefunding
- Their selection of regions has been largely customer driven.
- Getting rid of prefunding isn’t a huge issue for them
- “If there’s something that works we’ll use it but we’re not losing sleep over it”
- Seems like cracking tough markets is the big priority for them right now
- Are they too early stage?

Questions for them

- Where are your major routes?
- What size payments are you making?
- How much of your flow is related to weekend money movement?
- How are you currently handling demand for money movement at the weekend?
- How much cash is sitting in prefunded accounts as a proportion of total flow?
- What value-add services would you like to provide to your customers (on top of
money movement) that you can’t currently provide?

Ankit @ Salt
- They’re still learning and pivoting quite a bit
 - Launched a product in India in Jan.
- Indian SMEs who want to get cash in and out of India is the main focus
- Focusing on being a business bank and focusing on b2b payments
- Allows them to issue virtual IBANs
- Launched via a partner which allows them to make capital account
transactions
- For EM you can’t just build payments, you need to build a compliance layer
as well. Wise couldn’t just dive in without building out loads of compliance
stuff
- Right now even Paypal’s level of service isn’t as good in India as it is
elsewhere
- They need a partner who can do the collections from around their world and send it
to their nostro
- Lots of companies don’t want to sign contracts directly with Indian companies for
whatever reason
- As a result they’re applying for an MSB licence with Fintrac in Canada
- Impossible to operate globally as an Indian entity which is why they have a US entity
- Are looking at incorporating more entities around the world
- Long delays for everyone paying into India it seems. 4-5 hours for Paypal
- Payoneer charge around 2%, Paypal 5% to move money into India
- Indian ACH settles in 1-2 hours (called AFT (?)).
- They also have IMPS and UPI that settles immediately
- Focused on NA, Europe and middle east. Also mentioned Singapore

Jack @ ClearJunction
- Interested to know whether we have a license
- They only service FIs, only touch corporates if they’re huge.
- In order to work with us, they’d need us to be fully regulated
- Not sure whether their compliance team would be happy working with a company
currently in the FCA sandbox
- If they were to provide us with accounts they wouldn’t be able to provide us with
accounts for each customer due to the risk of nesting
- Might be hard to provide flat pricing, suggested that it’d be percentage, looking at 10-
15bps on all in/outflows.
- Could look at going to flat fee pricing as we scale up

@ Chipper Cash
- Do remittance and x-border across Africa but also handle flows to/from Europe/USA
- Currently in 8 markets
- Can buy crypto on there and adding more features as they go
- Pricing is very important to them
- If we give them 5.97 we’re hoping we can get it much cheaper on the market
- How do things work over the weekend
- They pull rates from xe all the time.
 - They prefund into different markets so that they have instant and net settlement
instead of needing to trade every time someone wants to move money
- If we could do instant payments into a SA bank account would that be interesting?
- They are trading T+1 right now so they’d like to be able to eliminate
- Uganda and Nigeria would be interesting for them as that’s where they’re doing lots
of volume
- Move $2-3mn/day at the moment into those countries
- They are looking at 5% moves every day moving money in and out of Nigeria?
- Stripe paying 6 bips on major routes for FX - Presumably this is delivered t+1

Nick @ Smallworld (round 2)

- What is the real saving for getting rid of prefunding?
- On the PHP corridor:
- Pain points are availability of capital, not cost. If I need another million
dollars it’s not the cost, it’s the fact that the demand for working capital
doubles over the weekend (triples over bank holidays)
- It’s super competitive on the PHP route and SW want to be the
cheapest. If there was a smart FX engine
- In an ideal world if we could provide a dashboard that optimised their FX spend and
managed to provide better rates than what they’re getting from the market right now.
- Certain situations suit crypto - some corridors and operators need we can do, others
can’t
- Ffwd 5-10 years and the regulators should be much better and also the
liquidity should be better
- At a webinar with BR ventures and one of the guys there used to run Tempo France
(stellar network) and his pitch was that they’ll charge 100 bips (onramping) to small
remittance companies
- They should accept USDC from customers
- They should send USDC around the world
- Ultimately he’s full of shit and not clear how settlement works
- Everyone who works with swift knows that it’s a pain when the banks are closed
- If you could build a great treasury dashboard that can optimise treasury, that’d be
great
- How do we figure out the value to the client?
- Everyone has different costs as they’ve built their own rails and systems
- A big part of SW’s business is that they have amazing commercial terms with
a big bank in Colombia - They would never give that deal to anyone today
- They have big trouble on PHP, Bangladesh and
- There’s no demand for
- Conceptually interesting and valuable to be able to free up trapped cash
- Interesting in Africa but not a problem in most other places as you can just
move it out
- Very slow treasury cycle of 5 days in west africa as the banks can’t move
money fast enough
 - The retail rate gets reviewed periodically over the weekend but the wholesale rate
gets locked on Friday
- Is it interesting if we can offer live rates over the weekend?
- “I think that could work”
- It requires treasury function to be working over a weekend in order to optimise
it
- “It’s not a key thing”
- “Main thing is you being able to move 10k GBPPHP cheaper than
another route”
- If you’re cheaper and can operate at weekends, there’s a path to getting all the
business
- Vs. just solving a little slice of the problem by just working at weekends
- They went through PSD1, PSD2 but the bulk of it you have to write yourselves.
- Definitely helpful to have an advisor to get through the process
- Arf haven’t solved for settlement.
- Ripple was heavily taken up by small companies
- Will be working on a consumer-facing digital remittance product in australia
- Transparency is a big issue in swift world but for anyone with their own tx databases
it’s easier
- Is Aus a big market?
- It’s a $5bn market, mainly to APAC but some other bits and pieces
- Would we need a crypto asset licence?
- Much chat about crypto custodians
- Actions
- Get historical pricing data to him
- He’ll forward us onto one of the SW people

Mikko @ Revolut
- The number one thing we do is charge a 100bips markup
- We’ll keep an inventory of a specific currency over the weekend (with some excess)
to service our customer needs
- They use an algorithmic rate when markets are closed to figure out what the
weekend rate should be
- Sounds like an AMM-style alg
- “It’s not that bad [holding cash over the weekend]”
- We have to prefund lots more crypto over the weekend as there’s no dollar
settlement for crypto trades
- Crypto doesn’t count as a safeguarded asset (unlike currency) so it doesn’t
count towards
- Only Silvergate are doing it
- Only using paxos in the US
- Revolut are their own crypto execution partner (???)
- They have 100 currencies on the app and they only have an issue in long-tail non-
settling currencies
- Is there much of a market for this in more exotic currencies?
- It’s not clear to me how much money you’ll make doing this
 - This thing of 24/7 FX isn’t really an innovation
- If there was a quotable market they could not charge the customers which
might be slightly better
- The problem with crypto is that loads of it is unregulated but it needs to be regulated
- Prefunding?
- Not really a problem as they have a lot of liquidity
- Most of their business is domestic with most cross-border going via card
schemes
- Remittance isn’t their main business right now

Martin @ Utoppia
- Super interested in this topic
- Manages
- In some markets you can’t get dollars so they solved that by using crypto rails e.g.
using stablecoins to get money in and out
- Most of google/amz/fbs contracts are in USD. Everything is priced in USD.
- E.g. if you’re in Argentina, a user pays with credit card and
- Right now FX is priced when the transaction is initiated, not when it settles
- Can be a 15 day settlement period which means you have a USD liability for
15 days
- Many companies are not going to have the cash when they want to lock FX
rates in
- Pre-IPO no banks wanted to work with them, afterwards all the banks wanted to work
with them
- dLocal lose or win big time on the FX.
- I’ve started hedging but I can’t do one hedge an hour as I don’t have the manpower
- Each country has its own settlement periods and volatility
- The thing that you need to consider is that for big companies, they have many big
banks that will work with them locally and that means normally the FX spreads are
really competitive
- If we charge too much spread they just won’t use us
- For companies like dlocal, cross border is half of their business
- The analysis that dlocal does
- In SA they’ll see what the spot is that the local banks are giving, how much
exposure they have and also the annual interest rate.
- In countries with high inflation the margin is potentially higher
- The hedging stuff is complex, time consuming and requires lots of
professional people doing that.
- There is a little bit of upside you could change to avoid dlocal needing to do
all that hedging
- Dlocal have local treasurers that do cash management in their currency
- If they have a big exposure, they’ll call the trading desk to manage the
FX risk for them and they’ll either support by buying spot or they’ll buy
derivs to hedge it
- There are just two metrics:
 - How many people are directly involved in currency trading. They’re expensive
e.g. 8-10k a month recruiting from latam
- If you have an exposure in brazil (30 days) you can win/lose quite a bit if the
rate moves. In some quarters we make money, in some quarters we lose.
- The key is not to sell on cost-efficiency, it’s to sell it as insurance
- In countries with high volume and high settlement times, they hedge with forwards
every day
- Still doesn’t help them with intraday swings which can be very large in
emerging margins
- They can still suffer 100k of loss due to FX swings
- Weekends are hard as they have to estimate volumes over the weekend
- Are major liquidity issues in latam markets where they can use all the liquidity up
- In argentina there’s only one hedging option and it’s really bad
- Can’t hedge over the end of the month
- They’d collected money but couldn’t get the money out of the country so they turned
it into stablecoins
- Can be any country and when the CB has liquidity issues they’ll stop selling
USD to the bank
- In Brazil there was a tax issue with the stablecoins that made them difficult to
use for getting money out of the country
- You might have a local partner and you can do things with that partner. Partner is
separate to your legal structure and
- MXN is super liquid and there’s almost no spread
- Almost everywhere in latam/apac there’s a 10-15 bps spread over reuters rate
- Most companies like dlocal don’t have working capital issues because they pay out
much slower than they can get the money
- The instant cash isn’t super valuable as a result
- They spoke to Ripple but ultimately they don’t really have
- I have 300m USD of customer money in my bank accounts just waiting there for the
settlement period.
- In some countries it’s entirely a case of being able to get money out of the country
- You could sell that separately to an FX insurance product
- So far they’ve just got one FX person, meant to grow to 3 this year
- WU have a huge team in argentina just to manage this stuff

Chris @ Bitt
- Intros
- It's entirely about what the customer wants and Bitt are there to digitise the currency
- Ultimately govt. and CB are in control, if they want to do something, Bitt will
facilitate
- Don't really have a view on FX/exchange functionality
- Don't work with exchange partners, that's on govt.
- Ultimately with eNaira it's up to the gov what they want to do
- Does think that a change in payment settlements will come in the future driven by
digitised currencies
 - e.g. KYC/AML right now is super clunky but by working with govt. Bitt can build it into
the product as well as tailoring it for every potential customer.
- They're an insider, don't have to worry about fighting regs like commercial
competitors do
- Really believe that this'll help their products become dominant
- Do you have any interop plans?
- Nothing right now, priority is to be flexible to work with whatever CB wants
and also to give them complete control over how it should be implemented

Guillermo @ dLocal
- Head of payouts & engineer
- They need to make payments in local currencies
- “If you guys can do local settlement that sounds interesting to me”
- They operate in latam.
- In some countries they are allowed to net but some countries they can’t
- They don’t have any delays
- Will point us towards the treasury team as he doesn’t really know much about this
- How do we operate?
- Saw that we operate with crypto and wants to know more about it
- Do we have a list of where we can operate?
- There is one guy at treasury who’s in charge of FX so we’ll be pushed on to them.

Pradeep, John @ Smallworld

- USD/PHP is more interesting to them than GBP/EUR
- Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan most difficult corridors
- Big problems there having to pay a day in advance
- BOA, TD, Citi, all used to send money to the Phillipines