International trade is more complex, expensive, slow and exclusive than any of us should accept. We see world trade as a great peacemaker, uniting goals and creating mutual benefit for everyone. Our aim is to connect regions separated by currency, culture and suspicion. This creates universal wealth and promotes cultural as well as financial inclusion. It's still a work in progress, but here we explain the aims and values behind our core operations.
commercial aims
Many regions of the world are seen by banks and financial institutions to be unprofitable business partners. This is largely because of the expense of dealing with them when set against the potential gains. Yet many of those regions hold some of the world's richest mineral, agricultural and human-power resources.
This is largely due to three factors:
- the high cost of the necessary diligence required to onboard counterparties, often in poorly documented and regulated regions
- forex losses and extended correspondent banking relationships to allow conversion between hard and local - often exotic - currencies
- high staffing costs to execute due diligence and/or maintain accounts in the necessary currencies and regions
Risk also plays a major role. While actual regional risk is often overestimated, the penalties for compliance failures can run into millions, even though no malfeasance may have taken place. The risk:reward balance greatly skews acceptability against trade choices.
Clarency's commercial aim is to redress this balance by reducing risk and cost through simplified processes, greater transparency, reduced duplication of effort and more efficient currency management.
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humanitarian aims
We find it unacceptable that so much of the world's population is excluded from global prosperity. Even in areas of great potential resource wealth, people are unable to benefit and become self-sufficient. Aid organisations work tirelessly to improve this situation, and we're working actively with several of them to ensure that more of their life-saving support reaches its targets. But aid can only do so much. It provides life-saving resources where it's needed today, and can deliver education and materials to build a better tomorrow, but while the established world continues to commercially isolate these reasons, little true progress can be achieved. Clarency's aim is to change this, pragmatically and with the urgency that it deserves.
We take a pragmatic view because idealism, while someething to which we all aspirre, has so far fared poorly against commercial gain. That's why we set our aim towards making excluded and disadvantaged regions more competitive by removing complexity, expense and risk. Our aim is to make international trade as simple, cheap and safe as it is to deal with the company in the next city. We haven't got there yet, but we're getting closer every day.
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anti-crime aims
Financial compliance is a powerful factor in successful world trade. Unfortunately, it's seen as exactly what it's called: compliance. It's seen as a necessary evil; a hoop through which financial organisations must jump to avoid potential penalties. We take a different view: it can become a powerful business enabler rather an a barrier.
Regulatory compliance these days has little to do with preventing financial crime; it's far more to do with blame-shifting. If a bad transaction slips through, no one worries too much as long as it can be shown that the required boxes were ticked beforehand. Detection is sketchy, and the unwieldiness of the investigation process means that the wrongdoers are far beyond reach before measures can be taken to catch them.
Our aim in developing our AML/ATF systems was to make compliance a real-time operation that monitors every transaction. That required us to be able to investigate and analyse every company and individual involved, to understand market values and shipping volumes for any commodity and to be able to trace physical delivery routes and documentation. All this had to be done without introducing delay or increasing complexity for our customers. Irregularities needed to be detected before payment was made, and an immutable audit trail must be generated for every payment, movement and even decision.
This is what we've delivered and continue to refine. An unexpected result has been that the extra detail we gather doesn't just reduce crime, it improves the customer experience by allowing our clients to understand their customers better and offer them an improved experience.
