Bitfinex is one of the world’s largest digital token trading platforms, yet its state-of-the-art technology was hampered by slow European payment rails. OpenPayd gave the exchange an alternative which made payments cheaper and faster for its customers.
When it comes to cryptocurrency Bitfinex is an absolute giant. It’s not a word we use lightly – it’s a word we reserve for businesses that, at the time of writing, process billions of dollars of transactions every month.
A digital token trading platform, Bitfinex has long been one of the most recognisable names in the industry and has a global footprint. However, for Bitfinex’s customers, purchasing digital tokens with fiat was an unnecessarily slow and costly process.
Through their existing SWIFT connection, payments would usually take 2-3 days to clear, maybe even longer. In the world of trading, this is slow. In the world of crypto, it’s glacial.
OpenPayd offers something different. By giving their customers virtual IBANs which are connected to the SEPA Instant payment rail, both pay-ins and pay-outs can happen in real-time, enhancing Bitfinex’s customer experience. Customers have full oversight, adding money to their crypto wallet and withdrawing to fiat as they please, while the operations team no longer have to spend painstaking hours reconciling individual payments manually.
Automated reconciliation also eliminates the possibility of human error. No one is wasting time chasing missing transactions and rectifying them when mistakes inevitably occur. Bitfinex can focus on growing and developing its offering, not carrying out unnecessary admin work on fiat payments.
So, how long does it take to create thousands of virtual IBANs? With OpenPayd’s developer-friendly API, the entire integration took less than a month. Our approach does not slow down the customer onboarding in any way and is built to scale. No matter how quickly Bitfinex’s customer base in Europe grows, OpenPayd’s infrastructure is built for the scale they are achieving.
In short, trading digital currencies in Europe is now much smoother for everyone involved.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex:
“We chose to work with OpenPayd because of its strong embedded finance capabilities, its ability to help us access SEPA real-time payment rails and the speed of integration its API enables. This collaboration forms part of our continued efforts to enhance a first-class customer service experience to our growing user base.”
