Case Study

How Arf Gives Financial Institutions Access to New Markets

Industry

Fintech

Location

Switzerland, Turkey

Use cases

Stellar for Payments

Products and tools used

Stellar USDC and EURC

Cross-border Payments

About

This is Arf

Arf is a regulated global liquidity and settlement platform for licensed financial institutions, providing short-term, revolving, and USDC-based credit lines for cross-border payments. Committed to transparency, Arf aims to enhance access to liquidity for cross-border financial institutions across the globe.

Challenge

Constrained by the banking infrastructure

As payments technology grows more sophisticated, customers expect cross-border payments to be faster, cheaper, and smoother than ever. However, the financial institutions 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, financial institutions 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. 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.

Solution

Reducing friction for MSBs

Arf saw how this type of capital-intensive business model could prevent institutions from being able to grow and solve the pain points of the cross-border payments industry. To solve this problem, Arf introduced the world's first short-term, revolving, and USDC-based liquidity solution for cross-border payments.

With this solution, financial institutions can make same-day settlements with their partners in destination markets while eliminating pre-funding and counterparty risk. Moreover, because all the loans and repayments happen on-chain, money transfers are always traceable and completely transparent.

Interoperability is key

What sets the Stellar network apart from other blockchains is its interoperability. The Stellar network can interoperate with other blockchains and traditional financial infrastructure via regulated financial institutions called anchors. Anchors can issue assets and/or provide on/off ramps onto the Stellar network.
Anchors using Stellar Ecosystem Proposal (SEP) 31 can natively use Arf’s infrastructure to access liquidity for cross-border payments.

A Thriving Ecosystem of Potential Partners

The Stellar ecosystem consists of hundreds of active projects and dozens of anchors. By actively participating in the Stellar ecosystem, Arf has connected with other companies in the payments space and can now offer them access to its liquidity for their cross-border transactions.
For example, an ecosystem member – a licensed remittance company – started using the Arf Credit Line to facilitate cross-border transactions between the US and Mexico without the need for pre-funding. Since the company has already integrated onto the Stellar network using SEP-31, they can easily on-ramp remittances in USD onto the network and off-ramp in pesos to Mexico.

USDC on the Stellar Network for Quick, Easy Settlement

Arf sought to leverage the world’s fastest-growing USD stablecoin in combination with the Stellar network’s fast and secure payment rails. Circle are responsible for issuing and governing USDC on the Stellar network, ensuring the stablecoin is trustworthy to use.

We all know the Stellar network and how it can support a wide variety of assets including stablecoins. It's a go-to blockchain that any kind of money-service business or financial institution can use.

Ali Erhat Nalbant, Co-founder & CEO of Arf

Developer Documentation

Dive into the docs

Issuing assets is a core feature of the Stellar network: any asset can be tokenized (or minted) on the network and then tracked, held, and traded quickly and cheaply. Explore our developer documentation to discover how.

Issuing an asset on the Stellar network is easy and only takes a few operations. However, there are additional considerations you may need to think about depending on your use case, such as publishing asset information, compliance, and asset supply, which we’ll cover in this documentation.

View Docs

Results

Impact

Arf has seen remarkable demand for its liquidity services since Arf Credit Line’s kick-off in 2022. In just 20 months, the company has extended over $830 million in USDC loans to financial institutions, utilizing a $16 million facility. The total on-chain transaction volume in USDC has surpassed $1.6 billion, and there have been no defaults or late repayments. Moreover, all transactions, including provided loans, repayments, capital turnover, and even defaults and late repayments, can now be traced on the blockchain.

As a category-defining liquidity platform, Arf demonstrates an exemplary use case of how blockchain and USDC effectively address liquidity constraints while making settlements more transparent, traceable, and real-time.

$50M+

Worth of USDC in Loans Provided Per Month

$400M+

On-chain Transaction Volume

50X

Annual Capital Turnover

Connect

Want to know more?

Contact us today to learn how your business can use Stellar to enable frictionless cross-border payment services and how the Stellar Development Foundation can help.

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