Founded in 2016, Banking Circle is a fully licensed bank which delivers and manages financial infrastructure on behalf of Banks and Payments providers. They supply clients with faster and more efficient access to cutting edge technology and services such as payments, accounts and lending that would require additional significant investment to support.
Banking Circle’s service, which has been built from the ground up to make it fit for purpose, is fully compliant and secure, and integrates seamlessly into client workflows through an API-based platform. Ultimately, the company takes away the need for clients to build and invest in costly technology infrastructure, enabling them instead to focus entirely on owning the customer relationship and growing their business.
Banking Circle work with a range of financial institutions, including acquirers, PSPs and banks, and the infrastructure provided is utilised to support the ever-evolving needs of customers. TechRound recently interviewed CEO of Banking Circle, Anders La Cour to find out more about the business, what it does and what makes it so different in the UK’s ever-growing fintech environment as well as that of the wider world.
How Does Banking Circle Help Financial Institutions In Faster Payments Processing Across The World?
Making payments quickly and across borders is a costly experience for organisations, especially if the transaction involves multi-currency conversion and settlement. Our financial infrastructure provides customers with access to real-time cross border and SEPA payments, as well as virtual IBAN accounts and bank accounts. This means that our customers can send funds in local currencies, which speeds up the process significantly and makes it more cost effective.
Juniper research recently revealed that cross border instant payments, where funds settle in 10 seconds or less will account for 9.3% of B2B transactions in 2022. Our technology will help further accelerate this growth, making it easier, quicker and more efficient to send funds cross border, in multiple currencies.
What Is The Main Issue Your Clients Face, And How Do You Address This?
One of the biggest challenges facing today’s banks and payments businesses is keeping up with customer demand for real-time payment processes, particularly cross border, as well as offering a range of services including lending and FX. Many banks still run on legacy IT systems installed in the 1970s and 80s, and upgrading these platforms requires an extraordinary amount of resources and investment. Our proposition as a financial infrastructure provider is to make it possible to transition to more cost-effective, cloud-based technology that will enhance the customer propositions for Banks and Payments providers.
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What Are Some Of The Technologies That Enable Financial Infrastructure Players To Do This?
Global payment rail connections are perhaps the most central cog in helping financial businesses improve the cost and speed with which they can make cross border payments. Our focus is on developing the technology required to directly connect to a large number of global payment rails and local clearings. Crucially, we have built our technology infrastructure on decoupled architecture as it offers an added level of flexibility and enables individual pieces of infrastructure to be updated. We are shaping our technology in a way that enables our clients to continue innovating and adapting as customers’ demands and expectations inevitably change.
The cloud also plays a key role in enabling Banking Circle to achieve incredible flexibility, as well as delivering best in-class speed. This is done through moving to event-based payments processing, rather than batch-driven which takes more time. This enables us to give our clients real-time insight on the status of their payments as they are processed through our system.
From a user perspective, our open APIs also make the entire cross border payments process more intuitive by facilitating the easy integration between the platform’s functions and clients’ workflows.