How Alpaca unlocked a streamlined and efficient funding experience for its global customers
Background
Alpaca is a Global API Brokerage platform. Since its launch in 2018, Alpaca’s mission has been to open financial services to people across the globe by building the de facto global standard for investment infrastructure that serves people both directly and indirectly.
However, a gap in Alpaca’s offering meant they relied on international wires for their international transactions. The FX conversions happened at the banks and were slow and costly. This was a pain point for Alpaca, as it didn’t provide the best experience to Alpaca’s broker partners when they built investing applications that allow international customers to buy and sell stocks and ETFs.
Alpaca needed to find a solution that could help solve this problem and bring their FX treasury movement in-house so that they could unlock the full potential of their business. They also wanted to be able to offer the ease and speed of local collections and payments to its customers.
Solution
Because Alpaca needed to ensure that funding was a seamless experience for everyone, from their first experience, they needed an international multi-currency solution.
Alpaca chose to work with Currencycloud because of Currencycloud’s wide global coverage and competitive rates.
Alpaca and Currencycloud
The added functionality Currencycloud provided allowed Alpaca to expand their offering and unlock their B2B2C business on a global scale with enhanced features.
Strengthening its service to end users
Currencycloud’s API paired perfectly with Alpaca’s proprietary brokerage platform technology. Alpaca initially deployed Currencycloud for its direct-to-trader business, before moving on to unlocking enhanced capabilities for their broker partners. This started with the service Funding Wallets for Broker API, allowing broker partners to create a dedicated wallet with a distinct account number for each user to deposit funds into.
Alpaca maximized Currencycloud’s extensive global reach, serving a wide number of users through one integration. Previously Alpaca had to integrate with multiple payment providers in each region. Today, Alpaca unlocks competitive funding flows in many of its key regions, using this as a key selling point in the regions where local collections and distributions are available.
Strengthening its internal processes
Before using Currencycloud, Alpaca’s operations team spent a number of hours supporting deposits to Alpaca every day – tracking down where funds belong, where they should be going to, and assessing what account funds should be deposited in. With Currencycloud’s features these processes were automated, meaning reconciliation and funds were accepted far more quickly.