Banking Circle boosts cross border payments with cloud-based platform

By Megha Bhattacharya

Financial infrastructure provider Banking Circle today announced that it is now cloud-based with its infrastructure hosted within Microsoft Azure. The company’s cross border payments platform has been built in-house and is based on microservices. It aims to deliver better payment processing times while providing clients with real-time insight into the status of their payments.

To boost compatibility and the user experience, it offers open APIs which enable easy integration between the platform’s functions and clients’ workflows. Beyond the core cross border payment service, these functionalities include reporting, user creation, reconciliation and account balance acquisition.

Anders la Cour, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Banking Circle commented, “To compete in today’s economy, companies have to trade globally. But the painfully slow pace and high cost of cross border payments can hamper business growth.

“It was always our goal to build a company with technology at its heart and combine it with a banking licence to reduce the cost and time of handling international payments. Traditionally the process has cost €50 and taken five days or more, but we want it to cost 50 cents and take under five minutes. Our cloud-based infrastructure and purpose-built platform is the next step on that journey, further improving the ease with which businesses can send money across borders.”

The new development will allow the company to evolve architecture even more quickly in response to the ever-changing demands of its clients. Recently, Banking Circle and mobile payment solutions provider HIPS Payment Group announced a partnership for enabling the latter to offer payment settlement with domestic payment rails. This will equip HIPS to provide simplified payments for its global merchant base with users able to purchase goods or services in their own currency. The two companies are collaborating to mitigate the need for bureaucratic systems and legacy tech.

Michel André, CIO, Banking Circle, added, “Before developing the new platform we spoke to our clients about what they want and speed was high on the agenda. So, we built the platform in the cloud from the start so that we could focus purely on developing the software that could meet and exceed those requirements. With our entire infrastructure now cloud-based too, we can react even more quickly to client demands and enhance specific areas without compromising on performance.

“I’m also delighted that we’re now able to not just deliver a faster service, but also a more intuitive user experience. By moving to event processing, for example, updates based on live use cases can now be made in real-time – optimising client’s day to day workflows. Ultimately, the new platform brings us one step closer to our ultimate goal of bringing the time it takes for businesses to make a cross border payment down to seconds.”