Silverbird launches in niche trade markets in under four months
With our help, Silverbird could offer bank accounts and forex transactions to its previously niche market. Find out how real-life digital banking businesses like Silverbird can focus on product differentiation, rather than getting caught up in the intricacies of technical implementation.
Challenges
- Navigating strict financial regulations.
- Creating bank accounts for clients.
- Allowing cross-border and FX payments.
Benefits
- Faster time to go live.
- Focusing efforts towards client onboarding.
- Freeing up resources for other efforts.
Silverbird is a Fintech business that exclusively focuses on serving international trade businesses. It’s a niche sector that is under-served by traditional banks, and comes with a wide-range of challenges. Are you are facing similar challenges? Drop us a line to explore which approach could work best for your fintech.
To get its product to market, Silverbird needed financial technologies that were difficult to obtain. That’s where Integrated Finance and Currencycloud’s offerings helped Silverbird to launch in under four months from contract.
The challenges of niche markets
The majority of international trade specialists struggle to access banking services because of geographical restrictions and a lack of business and user oversight. For example, a shipment of electrical wires may be indiscernible from a shipment of elicit goods. Traditional financial institutions may not want to risk dealing with these companies in case of legal or harmful shipments – even a single bad experience can lead to massive issues for an institution.
Diving into shipment manifests, the company’s background, and bills of lading are aspects of regional areas that are usually under served by the traditional banks.
Silverbird realised there was an opportunity to facilitate these shipments and help companies with their payment needs. However, the company needed to deliver a mass-market product to a niche sector that has traditionally struggled to gain access to bank accounts.
It was an undertaking that would otherwise have taken them months of development time to get off the ground.
Solving the challenge of access
To successfully launch its idea, Silverbird needed the ability to issue bank accounts in their client’s names, and allow users to make cross-border and FX payments. This would require building a sophisticated ledger system, and multiple workflows to facilitate complex money movements from scratch.
Some of the above mentioned challenges could be solved by connecting to the scalable cross-border and FX solutions provider Currencycloud, which would allow them to issue accounts for customers in over 25 different currencies. However, Silverbird would still require robust transactional orchestration to automate and streamline key financial operational processes. Furthermore, the company would require a way to monitor, aggregate and reconcile transactions across multiple accounts.
“When we looked to launch our digital platform, we needed a partner with expertise in international payments, cross border trade and foreign exchange, and quickly decided on Currencycloud as the platform that we would build our go to market strategy on top of.” – Max Faldin, CEO of Silverbird.
Silverbird also needed an easy-to-use interface to facilitate client registrations, access all of their necessary financial details, along with the ability to enable Silverbird employees to manage transactions.
The launch of Silverbird
With the help of our API-first Fintech infrastructure and Currencycloud’s FX capabilities Silverbird was able to launch in under four months from signing their contract with us.
Without Silverbird needing to worry about the nitty gritty of financial integrations and handling transactions effectively, they were able to instantly make an impact in the market and focus on serving previously underserved businesses that struggled to access banking.
4
months from contract to live
£480,000
savings on custodial operations costs
85%
reduction in development costs