by Jabu Henson, Chief Operating Officer, World First
World First is the UK’s fastest growing foreign exchange broker, offering private individuals and companies excellent service and highly competitive foreign currency exchange rates. Based in London, it was founded in 2004 and has since worked with over 20,000 private clients and 3,000 companies. In 2008, the company’s foreign exchange transaction volume was over £1bn. In April 2009, World First was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Award for International Trade. It won the award for offering its customers exceptional exchange rates, service and innovative products which have seen its overseas earnings increase six-fold over the last three years.
World First was founded to provide small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and private individuals with a personalised and responsive foreign exchange (FX) service, compared with the major banks which do not have the infrastructure to provide such a service to smaller clients. Another advantage of World First’s service is competitive pricing compared with the major banks. Whereas SMEs and private individuals can typically expect to see a 1-4% spread on market rates from banks and FX providers, we have been able to reduce this substantially. As a result, we have seen rapid growth over the past five years, growing from three to 72 staff and exponential expansion in trade volumes; for example, our payment volume has increased by 400% over two years. We can provide FX services in most tradable currencies, and provide both ad hoc and regular transactions to our clients.
While our payment volumes were still small, it was straightforward for our payments team to fax payment instructions or input them into our banks’ online payment systems. However, as our volumes have increased, we wanted to implement a more reliable solution to avoid the risk of error and enhance our operational efficiency. We have built a highly functional and automated back-office system for transaction processing, but we needed to extend our straight-through processing (STP) through our banking communications.
Consequently, we approached our banks to discuss SWIFT for corporates. We felt that SWIFT was the only option for us, as although there are multi-bank solutions for domestic or regional payments, we wanted a solution which would work for us globally. Our primary banks, Barclays and Citi, were very supportive. We needed a service bureau through which to connect to SWIFT, and considered three alternatives. We selected SMA Financial based on their close relationship with Barclays, competitive pricing and the quality of service. The relationship with Barclays was an important consideration; the implementation team from Barclays and SMA were very experienced and had worked together in the past so they managed the process well.
We connected to SWIFTNet in January 2009, and then tested our BIC set up and the initial message types we would send and receive: MT 101 (Request for Transfer); MT 103 (Single Customer Credit Transfer); MT195 (Queries) and MT 942 (Intraday Transaction Statements). We went live in April 2009.
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Our system creates messages in the appropriate format and stores the payment until the credit from the client has been received, at which point it is automatically released. In this way, we have achieved full STP from deal order to conclusion, except for a checking and approval process.
Although our SWIFT connection was only put in place recently, we have already seen a reduction in the time taken to complete transactions, increasing our operational efficiency and enhancing the service we provide to customers. There are still a few tweaks to be made to make sure the formats for less commonly used currencies/countries are correct, but payments and information in the most frequently-used currencies are now automated through SWIFT. So far, we have automated around 60% of our banking communications. As well as increased speed and efficiency, we have reduced the incidence of errors due to the lack of manual intervention in the process and accelerated the time taken to deal with exceptions and investigations.
The implementation of bank connectivity through SWIFT has been one element of an interconnected series of projects. We have integrated our back-office system with an on-line trading platform which currently enables clients to look at balances, rates etc. This is being extended to provide a full, secure self-service capability for dealing, sending payments and setting up direct debits as well as retrieving information. We needed to implement SWIFT connectivity as a precursor to doing this in order to achieve the required level of security and automation.
Now that we have infrastructure in place, we are in a position to extend our services to support our clients’ international eCommerce activities, without the need to expand our staffing further and with a high level of operational efficiency.