Helping Brookline Bankcorp grow and scale business banking with international offering
Founded in 1871, Brookline Bancorp is a mid-tier bank based in the greater Boston area with assets of $7.8 billion and annual revenue of around $270 million in 2019. Brookline Bancorp delivers a wide range of banking and financial services to both individual and business customers, including digital banking, loans, and capital markets.
Challenge
In 2017, Brookline Bancorp was looking to diversify its loan portfolios to include a larger mix of C&I loans across all three subsidiaries: Brookline Bank, Bank of Rhode Island and First Ipswich.
Brookline understood that it would need to up-tier its foreign exchange offerings, and that it wasn’t possible with the existing business model. To attract larger SME customers, it needed to not only revamp the services model and improve existing product offering, but also to move quickly.
The bank’s ability to scale their business banking was inhibited by three key factors:
- International banking services were relatively limited and high-cost, discouraging customer adoption.
- High-cost of the services due to bank’s complete dependency on large correspondent banks to provide foreign exchange and international payments for its customers. The correspondent banks had no incentive to offer competitive pricing, personalized service or advanced technology to Brookline Bancorp because they competed for the same business.
- All the factors combined resulted in a costly and negative experience for Brookline Bancorp’s customers. Poor customer service turned away larger SMEs and significantly inhibited growth.
To overcome these obstacles, Brookline Bancorp considered the option of building its own solution for international banking services from scratch. After an in-depth review the option proved to be extremely time consuming and require enormous investment both financially and operationally.
Brookline Bancorp therefore sought to partner with a non-bank provider that would meet their needs and help them get to market with their new solution within months, not years.
Partnership
After extensive research, Brookline Bancorp chose to partner with Currencycloud. The Bank’s team felt that Currencycloud provided the best solution because of its breadth of functionality, usability and ease of implementation.
Currencycloud enabled Brookline Bancorp to get all the international payments functionality it needed to kick start its commercial banking growth, including an easy solution for foreign exchange. Brookline Bancorp was able to vastly improve its international banking services with Currencycloud’s easy go-to-market model and cutting-edge technology.
Flexibility and Usability
Not only was Currencycloud’s solution flexible enough to adjust and accommodate bank’s unique operational processes, it was also exceptionally user-friendly. It became a stable alternative that was not subject to the threat of de-risking — unlike the correspondent banking model — ensuring a consistent experience for the bank’s end users. The technology integration was supported by a dedicated customer service team with great attention to detail and thorough knowledge of the regulation and compliance needs.
Currencycloud was also able to offer competitive pricing on FX and payments. Unlike traditional correspondent banking model, Currencycloud’s model was not based on a revenue share model, enabling the Bank to scale business banking with international offering quickly and capture more of the revenue as they grew.
Solution
Brookline Bancorp therefore established a partnership with Currencycloud. The bank offered its customers international payment capabilities by leveraging Currencycloud Direct — a turnkey white-label solution — a “one-stop-shop” for the Bank’s needs when it comes to providing SMEs with global banking experience.
Brookline Bancorp was able to implement and launch their new platform in just a few months. The modular structure of the solution enabled the Bank to add more features over time and roll out solutions as quickly, or as slowly as they chose. This allowed the Bank to “test the waters” with existing customers and gradually incorporate more features, as well as integrate with existing services like online cash management.
Currencycloud’s team facilitated all set-up, including technological implementation and legal aspects, such as KYC. Although Currencycloud offered thorough training, Brookline found it was able to quickly adopt and use the platform to its full extent due to its intuitive and user-friendly nature.
The platform enabled Brookline Bancorp to take control of their international banking services. The Bank could act on behalf of their customers and provide some of them with self-service portal to book trades and payments independently. Its customers no longer needed to call a banker or go through manual processes for payments. They could book conversions and payments themselves, all while Brookline Bancorp maintained ultimate control over the process and access to self-service features.