We often talk about Ebury being a disruptive Fintech company. Today I wanted to go into more detail about what makes Ebury a Financial and Technology company.

FINtech

Ebury’s core business is foreign currency exchange (Forex), and we focus on the enterprise segment of the market. To better illustrate what we do, let’s take as an example a made-up European toy company, which we will call TOYSA.

TOYSA’s biggest season is the Christmas holiday period between December and January. TOYSA sells toys to many countries in Europe including the UK. Their UK sales channel received large orders for their new drone, the TOYSA D500. Their UK office would like to know what should be the retail price in British Pounds (GBP). The TOYSA D500 is produced in a factory in Shenzen, China and a single unit to make costs 790 Chinese Yuan. Let’s say that “today” that is equivalent to 100 Euros. TOYSA would like a 20% margin on their toys, so they retail at 120 Euros in mainland Europe, that “today” translates to 110 GBP.

In order to have the toys ready for sale in December, they need to be ordered in June so they can be manufactured in August, and TOYSA is going to be running a big marketing TV advertising campaign in October.

But TOYSA’s CFO can’t sleep at night… she is worried. What if the Yuan grows strong against the Euro from June to August? Their 100 Euros cost calculation could be completely wrong!! Conversely, with Brexit looming, the British Pound could devalue against the Euro, a retail price of 110GBP could not even cover the cost of manufacturing…

This is where Ebury can help TOYSA. We offer both Spot (right now) and Forward (any time up to two years) contracts that remove the risk of currency fluctuations by providing a fixed exchange rate for a future date. TOYSA’s CFO can use these rates to calculate her profit and retail prices removing risk from the equation.

But… hold on! She is still worrying. She needs to pay for the shipment of drones with money that will come from future D500 sales, which she doesn’t yet have! Yup… Ebury can also help with that. It is called Trade Finance.

finTECH

Ok, now you understand what we do but how do we do it with over 140 currencies? With quite a bit of Django/Python.

Our back-end services, which all run on Amazon EC2 (some of them as part of ECS clusters), take care of financial tasks such as getting quotes for currency exchanges, instructing payments, receiving funds, Anti-Money Laundry checks, reconciliation of accounts, and so on. All new services developed in the last few years run in AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) and we are right now, in the process of containerising older services.

Customers contract Ebury’s products in 3 different ways:

  • They contact their Ebury account manager. Our Front-office team is pretty large, and to ensure consistency, we automate our sales and operations processes in Salesforce. Some of our back-end systems also have “admin” level consoles for financial reports and complex operations, these are built as Django applications.
  • They use Ebury Online (EBO). online.ebury.com is a Javascript application served by a Django app, that provides a two-factor authentication login into a front-end for customers to manage their transactions and book new currency trades. It connects to our back-end services internal API.
  • They use their own ERP (such as Netsuite). Netsuite is just one of the ways customers can access our REST API, which is a Flask service that provides a programmatic interface to the same internal back-end API used by EBO.

Join Us!

If all of this sounds interesting and you are looking for a new opportunity, we are hiring!! Whether it’s a remote position you are after or you would like to join us in our Central Malaga office, get in touch! We could have the role for you.

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