Acquiring a niche
Raising its first round of investment in 2012, Currencycloud went on to be acquired by Visa in 2021 following a commercial partnership and investment. For Arundel, selling all of Currencycloud’s shares, while a difficult choice, was the right one. “We effectively have a shared purpose. Visa talks about uplifting everyone everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.
“It's not like Visa acquired us for revenue or anything like that. They're saying actually together we can go and solve this challenge. And, after our initial partnership, seeing how we operate, seeing the mutual customers and mutual benefit we can bring to some of their other kinds of assets, it's a compelling offering.”
For Arundel, joining Visa was like “entering a door into a bigger room. We're still trying to solve the challenges of cross-border payment issues but with more people around the table. How can I get my money overseas as quickly and cost-effectively as possible in the best experience for other retail users or businesses? This is still a process both Visa and Currencycloud are working on solving, and there’s still loads more we can do.”
A time for customer focus
With a lot more to do to improve cross-border payments now is the time for innovations and customer-focused products to hit the market, according to Arundel. In a time of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for people to transfer money overseas as efficiently as possible.
“I think what any economic crisis does is allows people to focus on their core and obsess over their customers. And I think that's what embedded finance companies should be doing is obsessing over their customers. I think things might have gone – between the post-pandemic, pre-economic meltdown periods – a little bit crazy.
“It was a world where funding was rife. Every time, you turned on your computer, there'd be a new banking application, a new embedded application for something. So I think now is a time for focusing on how we can solve the customer's problem. What financial services do people want embedding into an application and where does it make sense?”
Staying compliant
Of course, despite the need to solve customer problems, compliance remains top of the agenda for Currencycloud. “There's a balance between innovation and that duty from a compliance point of view. You've got to make sure that the partnerships in this space are being put together in the right way, and that people know what they're doing so that those offering consumer-facing business are not like four or five links removed from what’s happening”, Arundel says.
“I think sometimes people view compliance as just onboarding the business or individual, but it's all the kind of post-transactional stuff that goes along with it like transactional monitoring, screening of transactions and understanding how people are trying to gain that system and sent money around the world.
“Bad guys will always try and find avenues to get around the traditional banking systems. So maybe they will creep into these embedded finance companies, and that’s something the industry needs to be wary of. But luckily there are businesses out there which have compliance at the top of their agenda.”
