Fintech player Aspire taps JPMorgan to help companies with forex conversions

[SINGAPORE] Fintech player Aspire has partnered JPMorgan Chase’s payments arm to enhance forex capabilities for the startup’s business clients.

The initial phase of the agreement will focus on FX conversions across multiple currencies including the pound, Singapore and US dollar, Aspire said on Thursday (Apr 9).

For JPMorgan, partnering with Aspire is part of its focus on supporting fintechs. On its part, the financial services provider will bring its global scale to support Aspire’s customers.

Amy Tan, Asia-Pacific head of tech and innovation, global corporate banking at JPMorgan, said: “Given our scale as a global financial institution, our FX solution avails a wide range of currencies that support the global requirements of Aspire’s customers.”

This partnership will allow Aspire’s customers, which consists of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to instantaneously convert currencies within their accounts.

This is an improvement from the current approach which is to consolidate FX trades of Aspire’s customers and complete them with various partners, which can take 30 seconds or more.

Andrea Baronchelli, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aspire, told The Business Times, said: “Which is a big scheme of things. It might sound very negligible, but obviously it gives a certain enhanced reliability and smoother experience.”

The longer FX trades take to settle means more uncertainty on the conversion rate, he added. This could lead to potential accounting leakage from currency conversion, and Aspire sought to bring the same kind of instant settlement that typically only enterprises have to SMEs.

Currently about half of Aspire’s client base utilises FX conversions on its platform, centred around FX corridors such as the Singapore dollar to ringgit.

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The decision to partner JPMorgan stemmed from the need for scale and geographical reach, said Baronchelli. Aspire now serves SMEs across 30 jurisdictions, compared with the past when the platform mostly needed regional FX pairs within South-east Asia.

“We are serving a segment of SMEs that typically do not have access to the global treasury management product that an enterprise would have,” he said.