Case Study March 8, 2020

Simplifying international payments for Agility Forex

Established in 2013, Agility Forex is a Canadian-based Fintech company that offers currency pricing to all, at rates normally reserved for large corporations. Through its proprietary technology, Agility Forex helps users bypass the banks to access interbank market pricing without bank fees and commissions, so that money can be sent abroad at the lowest possible cost. At its core, Agility Forex removes complexities associated with foreign exchange to make transactions simpler, faster and more affordable for small businesses and consumers.

Challenge

When you send a few thousand dollars to a customer, friend or family overseas, the excessive FX fees and long timeframe often make the experience stressful, painful and expensive. This pain point was the genesis of Co-Founder Andrew McGuire’s experience at his bank in Canada. When transferring money to the UK, he was faced with horrific foreign exchange rates and a ridiculous timeframe to complete a simple transaction.

Andrew collaborated with former colleague Iain Thomson to combine their years of experience in global financial markets and investment banking, from previous roles at Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland, to simplify the FX process for individuals and small and midsize businesses.

The vision for Agility Forex was simple: remove the murkiness around international payments. By combining Fintech innovation and applying it to traditional functions accessible via banks, Agility Forex offers users better FX pricing, cheaper transaction costs, time efficiency and access from anywhere.

When Agility Forex launched, there were limited options in the Canadian market (and internationally) for transferring money. On top of that, existing cross-border payment options were charging as much as five percent in fees. Agility Forex was founded with the goal of offering online services, excellent rates (that were better than the banks by a large margin) and to make it easier for people to transact. Open 24 hours a day with great prices, the company serviced Canada but wanted to expand even further with plans for global growth.

With the ultimate goal of making transfers within markets like Europe, Australia, New Zealand and across the APAC region, the company needed a solution that was cost efficient and easy to implement. Without strong capabilities to expand into other markets already in place, Agility Forex turned to Currencycloud to help build out its global ecosystem.

Partnership

For Agility Forex, partnering with Currencycloud was the perfect solution. By leveraging Currencycloud Direct, Agility Forex managed to quickly launch a comprehensive, user-friendly platform that makes it easy for their customers to pay, convert and manage their funds without the cost and complexity that is traditionally associated with cross-border payments and FX.

To build banking relationships in different territories is always a challenge – by collaborating with Currencycloud, Agility Forex was able to grow quicker and achieve a new geographic footprint and a new level of efficiency, almost overnight. Currencycloud has built a network that can pay into 180+ countries via SWIFT and over 35 countries via local-in country bank accounts. The partnership lets Agility provide a far more comprehensive solution to its customers.

In addition, payments and FX liquidity go hand in hand. When faced with a requirement to pay out in New Zealand Dollars, for example, Agility Forex generally doesn’t keep a great deal of this particular currency on hand. The partnership with Currencycloud has allowed for an opportunity to not only buy currencies at wholesale rates but also to make the payment concurrently.

Overall, simple integration has allowed Agility Forex to make better payments. Whether SMEs or large corporations, the ability to service each of these demographics has allowed Agility Forex to take the “gray” out of payments.

Results

By utilizing the Currencycloud Direct platform, Agility Forex was able to get to market fast and provide their customers with a user-friendly platform that exceeded expectations and fueled adoption among its customers.

The intuitive nature of the platform has since landed Agility Forex with an impressive 9.7/10 rating on TrustPilot, further emphasizing the customer-centricity of their approach.

As the company continued to grow its customer base and improve their brand reputation within the industry, Agility Forex was able to focus on attracting partnerships with larger clients such as CentralOne, Canada’s largest credit union.

Now that the business is entering a stage of rapid growth, Agility Forex has developed plans to integrate Currencycloud’s modular APIs in order to efficiently build out their platform and automate treasury workflow. This will enable them to allocate more resources to improving their product offering so they can better serve larger clients through partnerships.

By partnering with Currencycloud, Agility Forex was able to expand its settlement network to over 35 currencies in a very short period of time. This has allowed Agility Forex to keep pace.

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