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About
Arf
Arf is a global settlement banking platform, eliminating the capital-intensive business model of the cross-border payments industry by offering digital asset-based working capital and settlement services with native on-ramp and off-ramp capabilities to licensed money service businesses and financial institutions. Arf serves as a regulated strategic partner for e-wallets, neobanks, FX providers, digital remittance companies, and payment companies.
Challenge
As payments technology grows more sophisticated, customers expect cross-border payments to be faster, cheaper, and smoother than ever. However, the money-service businesses (MSBs) responsible for facilitating these cross-border payments are constrained by the traditional correspondent banking infrastructure and by limited access to liquidity.
Cross-border payments still take several days to settle through the world’s most used networks including SWIFT. This is why even though the KYC and compliance portion of a payment can be validated quickly, the money itself does not transfer at the same speed. Instead, this money must first pass through a correspondent bank before arriving at its final destination.
Thus, as transactions scale, MSBs require increasing amounts of pre-funding capital in order to keep balances in accounts across different countries before the payment actually arrives. The amount of pre-funding capital needed to facilitate large flows of cross-border payments is often inaccessible to new entrants such as challenger and neo-banks, barring much-needed innovation from the industry.1 Even large companies and unicorns struggle; they have to constantly go to liquidity providers or banks to ask for more money as they try to keep up with demand.
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