The Job I Didn't Finish at the Bank

Somewhere in a bank, or at one of its clients, there was always a physics or maths PhD typing numbers from one screen into another to keep a process running. For the last three and a half of my 32 years in markets and banking, as Head of FX Product at Barclays, a big part of my job was making sure they didn't have to. I'm writing this for the people who run payments for small businesses, because I think they are now best placed to finish what we started.

In 2019 I set up a team we called FX Automation. Our clients had currency risk that followed rules, so a machine should be able to manage it. An online marketplace wanted to show its customers a price in their own currency and hold it for a week. An asset manager needed every flow in and out of its US equity fund hedged, and the hedge rebalanced daily. Airlines, travel firms and online retailers had their own versions.

We had every product a treasurer could dream of, so on paper each project was easy. In practice they were very hard, and almost always for the same reason: plumbing. Our systems and the client's systems had never been introduced. We spent months learning what came out of their APIs and what went into ours, then squeezing one into the other until it fitted. Client integrations took months, sometimes years, with dozens of people involved on both sides.

We only did this for big clients, the ones whose transactions could pay back that much effort. A company selling £3m of furniture a year to Italy never got anywhere near it. We just couldn't make the cost of connecting to them work, and most of them would never have got the credit line a forward needs anyway. I think that is a big part of why fewer than 5% of SMEs protect themselves against currency moves today.

I left the bank in December 2022, thinking I was retiring. ChatGPT had come out a few weeks before, which in hindsight is a bit like leaving a party just as the band starts setting up. A year later I registered a company called CurrencyGuard, around one idea that kept me awake more than a retired man should be: let the companies that already handle an SME's payments give it the same protection the big clients had, as simple as the payment itself and with no credit line. In June 2024 I called Peter Atkinson, who had been Global Head of Fixed Income eTechnology at Barclays and my IT partner for years. He had just come back from studying machine learning and AI at Imperial College. I pitched him the idea and, somehow, he said yes.

Today Peter runs our engineering with AI agents doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and nothing reaches a client before it passes the three thousand tests we run every day. One agent drafts our updates to shareholders. We call him Jean-Claude, because of the French accent. His English is better than mine, which I have decided not to take personally.

What impresses me most is that the work my team spent months on at the bank now takes seconds. In the film above, an agent opens a business owner's accounts in Xero, sees that a customer in Italy always pays about eleven days late, gets a price to protect the invoice and tells the owner what to quote in euros. Nobody wrote an integration. The agent used connectors that already exist, and every month there are more of them.

One step in the film doesn't work yet: buying the protection. The agent can reach the accounting and the email on its own. What it can't do is move money or buy protection without a regulated company that knows the client and holds the payment. That company is the payment provider.

If you run a PSP, you already have everything this needs. You onboarded these businesses, you did their KYC, you hold their money and you make their payments. You don't have to manage the currency risk yourself; that is our job, sitting behind you. What you need is a secure way for an agent to buy the cover with the payment, with you deciding who can do what, and up to which limits.

Stripe recently made transfers between businesses on its network free. Moving money is heading towards zero, and the margin is moving to what you wrap around the payment. When an SME's agent goes looking for someone to protect an invoice, it will use the provider that answers.

At the bank I spent three and a half years building this for about 20 clients. You have thousands, sometimes millions, of SMEs already onboarded, and connecting to them no longer takes months. If you'd like to see the agent in the film working with your own pricing, send me a message. Jean-Claude will make sure I reply.