BankHedge is a cloud-native infrastructure purposely built to enable banks to bring new, digital FX hedging and cross-border, multi-currency payment services to their SMEs clients, in a transparent, guided and affordable way. Integrated with the Temenos banking platform, BankHedge enables Temenos banking clients to fully automate their entire FX hedging process including the automation of settlements, to create seamless multi-currency management experiences, embedded when and where SMEs need it, via a simple self-service interface that’s accessible 24/7.

Foreign exchange and foreign currency exposure continues to be an expensive, complicated and risky process for small and medium sized businesses worldwide, costing them billions in hidden fees and exchange rate fluctuations. This results in a dramatic erosion of revenue and profit pools for one of the most important engines of employment creation and economic growth globally.

While SMEs recognize the importance of having a foreign currency strategy, a big majority are still not using FX hedging services[1], reflecting a massively underserviced market. By leveraging BankHedge, banks are now able to expand and improve their SME banking offering to address this gap, while opening up new market segments and revenue streams at low customer acquisition and servicing costs.

Since 2017, ALT21 has been specializing in creating advanced technology solutions primarily for its subsidiary, a regulated entity overseen by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. The company has focused on developing and servicing sophisticated multi-currency and FX hedging solutions tailored for SMEs and brokers. In a bid to dramatically increase the mass-adoption of FX hedging solutions by SMEs, the company has built a dedicated banking software division focused on providing cutting-edge technology for banks to improve their end-to-end FX operations and services.

Martin Bailey, Director of Innovation and Ecosystems at Temenos, said: “Temenos Exchange acts as an accelerator for fintechs, helping them validate and scale new banking solutions. The integration with Temenos and joining Temenos Exchange means ALT21 can write once and be readily available to banks globally that run on our platform, matching functional excellence with operational resilience and scalability.”

Temenos Exchange brings innovation such as BankHedge to market faster, and at scale, on top of Temenos’ open platform for composable banking. The two companies share strong DNA of building digital infrastructure enabling banks to reduce the costs of development and accelerate the creation of new financial services for SMEs. This deep-routed integration with Temenos will offer an almost plug-and-play, universal solution which brings functional, technological, and commercial advantages to banks seeking to bring FX hedging and cross-border payment solutions to market, cost effectively and at speed.

Pritesh Ruparel, CEO at ALT21, said: “At ALT21, we’re on a mission to use technology to make financial services more accessible, transparent and affordable to businesses worldwide. We’re bent on providing a highly-automated service that cuts cost and complexity in a critically important area - protecting small businesses against high currency exchange fees and cross-currency fluctuations. With the biggest majority of small businesses still operating solely in the banking ecosystem, our collaboration with Temenos is highly strategic step in our mission to become the hedging solutions partner of choice to banks in +150 countries running on the Temenos platform.”