Pritesh, ALT21 is on a mission to democratise hedging for every business. How are you going about doing that?
If we take a step back, our mission is to help small and medium-sized businesses reduce the costs and risks of doing business internationally. For many small, medium, or fast-growing businesses, the cost of FX can be an afterthought when the priority is to sell their product. Managing your FX should be quick, simple, and cost-effective, but the reality is that, for most businesses, it is not.
Foreign exchange often involves hidden costs and charges, with British SMEs losing £2.8 billion and Irish SMEs losing over €430 million annually due to excessive and hidden FX fees. Hedging is a whole different ball-game. ALT21 aims to eliminate these hidden costs, making currency exchange, and hedging straightforward, transparent and affordable for all businesses.
What range of products and services does ALT21 currently offer and who are you providing these for?
Our go-to-market strategy is three-pronged. As a dual regulated company we provide multi-currency accounts, currency exchange, and online hedging services directly to SMEs and fast-growing startups. Secondly, we work with partners who embed our service natively into their customer journeys.
Not only do we work with many firms that leverage our technology but we also enable B2B marketplaces, accounting platforms, and other vertical fintech SaaS companies to enhance their clients’ protection from exchange rate fluctuations and unlock new opportunities. Lastly, we have built a dedicated banking software division focused on providing cutting-edge white-labeled technology for banks to fully automate their entire FX hedging process and improve their end-to-end FX operations and SME banking services.
You have developed an all-in-one technology platform, X Hedge that automates the end-to-end currency exchange and FX hedging processes. Please tell us a little about the key features and functionality this offers and the currencies it supports.
Our flagship platform, X Hedge, is powered by our proprietary API infrastructure; we don’t white-label other infrastructure because the existing technology stack is not cutting-edge enough for us. By building in-house, we have uniquely been able to expand our capabilities to bring a full range of hedging products together with multi-currency payment solutions to solve the problems for business owners and finance and treasury teams worldwide. The pricing is unbeatable, the service is first-class, and we’re in this for the long run. We move so fast that one of the team members recently said we did more in 6 months than they did at their last role at a leading non-bank in the last four years.
What are the main benefits that the platform delivers?
We simplify access to services that were previously exclusive to large corporates, allowing startups and SMEs to access the right multi-currency and hedging products cost-effectively and intuitively. This, in turn, enables these firms to make better, more informed decisions about protecting their businesses from the inherent risks of cross-border financial operations. Everything we do comes with transparent and ultra-low, if not the lowest, rates on the market, so that businesses can maximize their savings from foreign exchange.
Our flagship platform is X Hedge
This is a highly competitive industry. How do you manage to offer such competitive FX conversion rates? In what ways have you leveraged new technology and engineered your offerings to try and differentiate them from competitors?
Our team brings a unique combination of deep knowledge of the microstructure of the FX market, distinguished engineering capabilities, and an extensive network of connections in the market. This has enabled us to build and offer one of the most disruptive FX solutions for businesses – by a long shot. We can sustainably offer competitive rates that are up to 10 times lower than the cheapest providers, following multiple years of investment in developing a technology platform that automates all key steps of the end-to-end currency exchange and FX hedging processes, with low human touch and straight-through processing, significantly reducing our operating costs.
It’s been an exciting and very busy few months for ALT21. Please tell us a little about some of the highlights in terms of your ongoing product development and collaborative efforts to become the hedging solutions partner of choice.
We’re busy on many fronts, accelerating our go-to-market at pace. Another notable highlight is our recent partnership with banking software leader Temenos, which provides thousands of banks running on Temenos software with a plug-and-play, universal solution for bringing automated FX hedging solutions to market, cost-effectively and quickly. More similar partnerships will be announced soon.
Looking ahead what plans does ALT21 have for launching new solutions and trying to bridge the gaps that still exist between human interaction and trading apps for businesses?
Our foundation lies in innovation, so our key focus is continuing to build business-centric solutions that solve real problems for our customers and partners. We are developing product capabilities that weren’t possible years ago, and deploying faster than ever. We are excited to deliver more innovation to a global customer base that is looking for a modern fintech solution.