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.
A win-win for Alpaca and its customers
Currencycloud enables Alpaca to offer:
Funding Wallets for Broker APIs
This dedicated wallet functionality enables brokers to streamline their fund management and offer a simple, streamlined, and transparent experience for their end-users. This automated solution removes time-consuming manual processes, allowing end-users to enjoy faster settlement – they can seamlessly deposit and withdraw funds in their local currency using local rails. Each end-user has a unique funding wallet number, enabling funds to be deposited accurately to brokerage accounts.
Competitive FX and International local collection
Alpaca’s customers benefit from reduced settlement times, lower fees, and a local experience. Currencycloud enables Alpaca to offer competitive FX rates, passing on some of these savings along to their customers.
Results
Since partnering with Currencycloud, Alpaca has benefitted from significant savings in both time and money, and now offers an inclusive suite for investing, brokerage, custody, and post-trade processing.
A few highlights:
● Reaching a wide number of users through one integration, not through multiple payment providers
● Reducing settlement time from days to minutes
● Unlocking competitive funding flows in many of its key regions
● Saving thousands of dollars a month in operational efficiencies
Faster settlement
For one key client, settlement times have decreased from one and a half days to around 30 minutes, with similar time savings for most clients.
FX savings
Alpaca receives competitive FX rates, passing on a percentage of these savings to their customers.
New business flows
Currencycloud’s virtual accounts have enabled Alpaca to generate additional revenue by offering a customer-focused new product: Funding Wallets for Broker API.
Time savings Alpaca’s customers save time with local collections as they see their funds quicker, enabling them to trade on the platform.
Operational time savings
The time-consuming manual processes conducted by Alpaca’s operations team have been eliminated, freeing up time to work on other customer-facing projects.
Operational cost savings
Alpaca estimates that there will be several thousands of dollars a month in savings once it has full adoption of the Currencycloud solution among all its users.
Money savings
Alpaca’s customers benefit from more cost-effective transactions as they don’t have to use SWIFT when local collections are carried out.
