Fintech player Aspire taps JPMorgan to help companies with forex conversions

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

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

For JPMorgan, partnering 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 consist 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 the forex 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: “It might sound very negligible, but obviously, it gives a certain enhanced reliability and smoother experience.”

Forex trades taking longer to settle translates to more uncertainty on the conversion rate, he added. This could lead to potential accounting leakage from currency conversion. 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 forex conversions on its platform, centred around forex corridors such as the Singapore dollar to ringgit.

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Baronchelli said that the decision to partner JPMorgan stemmed from the need for scale and geographical reach. Aspire now serves SMEs across 30 jurisdictions, compared with the past when the platform mostly needed regional forex 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.