The 2016 Benzinga Fintech Awards: Changing The Way Companies Do Banking

For the second year in a row Benzinga is proud to host the Benzinga Fintech Awards, dedicated to recognizing the most innovative companies in the world of fintech. In anticipation of the May 24 gala, we're introducing you to those companies that will be in attendance. For more information on submitting your company, voting for the finalists, or attending the event, click here.

Continuing our series, Benzinga presents FX4BIZ, the lone Belgian company to be attending.

Benzinga: Why did you start your company?

FX4BIZ: The world is becoming more and more globalized and global supply chains are highly fragmented; more and more international trade is coming from smaller companies all over the world. Due to their size these companies are not being well served by banks in terms of ease of access of the services and the pricing. FX4BIZ aims to thin the gap in terms of services and pricing conditions between the largest corporations and the smallest ones by providing a unique and clever open-web banking solution for managing foreign exchange transactions.

Benzinga: What do you think makes your offering unique in the Fintech space? Do you have any close competition?

FX4BIZ: FX4BIZ is the only Belgian FinTech, with a PSP license (granted by the BNB), which provides a one-stop shop payment factory. We provide our clients with bank accounts in multiple currencies (FX4BIZ was the first PSP to provide a Bank Account infrastructure to corporates) combined with a high end payment engine and FX liquidity. While the majority of our competitors are located in the UK and only very few of them have proprietary technology, we have launched FX4BIZ in Belgium at the heart of Europe, and developed our own technology.

Benzinga: What drives you to get up every single day and work on your business?

FX4BIZ: Supporting corporations in their day-to-day business by making payments, which is a boring thing to do, as easy and frictionless as possible so that they can focus on their core activity.

Benzinga: How do you help people make money?

FX4BIZ: Today a bank would typically need to charge high, and often hidden, fees to their customers in order to be able to pay the 3 departments that would be involved when a corporation needs to make a payment in currency: the corporate team (in charge of the relation with the client), the investment banking arm (which will provide the currency), and the retail arm (which will handle the actual payment). As a PSP we have a lean organization and pride ourselves on offering a transparent solution. Therefore, we do not charge any hidden fees and we enable our clients to save time as our platform makes making payments easy. 

Benzinga: What’s the biggest challenge to your company going forward, and how do you plan on overcoming it?

FX4BIZ: Our business relies on the fact that our technology remains cutting edge and on our ability to acquire volume.

Benzinga: How can users find/interact with your company?

FX4BIZ: FX4BIZ has a website which provides all the necessary information on our product offering. Once a Company becomes a client of FX4Biz it can access our platform on any device (we provide an open web solution which is developed in responsive design). Larger clients and institutions can get access to our services through an API (“Application Program Interface”)