Digital innovation has enabled Finaro (previously Credorax) to transform from a start-up company into a leading international acquiring and payment services provider. Founded in Israel in 2007, the company set a goal of shaking up the world of merchant acquiring by accelerating and simplifying cross-border e-commerce transactions—a rapidly growing market set to be worth almost $5 trillion by 2021.

Today, Finaro is headquartered in Israel and Malta, with additional offices in the USA, Japan and China, and a commercial presence spread throughout Europe. Additionally, Finaro holds full banking licenses in the EEA, USA and Japan. In 2018 alone, Finaro processed transactions worth almost $5 billion. Listed among the top 100 FinTechs in Europe by KPMG, the company has received recognition from industry-leading bodies, winning “Merchant Acquirer of the Year” at the Emerging Payments Awards in 2015.

Determined to build on its strong record of success, Finaro saw an opportunity to bring even more value to its clients by adding commercial banking services to its offering. The company began to plan its first steps into the banking market, and looked for a technology partner that could help it realise its ambitious growth strategy.

Combining acquiring with traditional banking

More than 4,000 merchants are served by Finaro’s acquiring and gateway services. In parallel, those businesses often hold a separate transactional account with a traditional commercial bank to manage their finances. Finaro realised that transferring funds between accounts represented a time-consuming and complex process for its clients.

Senior Product Manager at Finaro explains: “We are always looking for ways to make merchants’ lives easier. We recognised that managing multiple accounts was a significant source of friction, and we decided to offer a banking service that would make Finaro a one-stop shop for merchants who want to easily manage their entire cashflow.”

Identifying the right innovation partner

In 2015, Finaro gained a full banking licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority, becoming one of the first FinTechs in the world with the right to offer business banking products. To help develop and launch the new line of business, the company looked for a robust, scalable core banking platform, and selected Temenos Transact running in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Senior Product Manager explains: “We looked at several leading vendors, and Temenos really stood out as a technology innovator. We were very impressed with their roadmap, and the level of investment into research and development, new releases and functionality. What’s more, the Temenos platform aligned perfectly with our technical requirements, providing the capabilities for rapid product development and the scalability to support our and our merchants’ business growth.”

“Adding Temenos was a no-brainer for us as we want to provide the scalability necessary to dominate the financial services industry and couple that with versatile and innovative cloud services […] Temenos enables us to be leaders in cloud banking technology and enhances our offering. That’s not only a win for both our businesses but for our customers as well.”

Moshe Selfin, COO, Finaro

Unlocking the benefits of the cloud

As a lean, fast-moving company, Finaro was also keen to avoid the ongoing cost and complexity of managing on-premises infrastructure, and decided to look for a best-in-class cloud platform. As the first vendor in the world to offer a core banking platform as a managed service hosted on Microsoft Azure, Temenos was the natural choice.

“Despite our growth in recent years, we still maintain a real start-up culture at Finaro and aim to be as agile as possible,” adds Senior Product Manager. “The cloud model means we don’t have to worry about investing in infrastructure and ensures we can focus our resources on what we do best: innovation. As we onboard more users onto our banking service, the cloud model will also make it very quick and easy to scale our core banking environment.”

Harnessing expert support for a rapid go-live

Finaro aimed to launch its new banking service rapidly, and turned to Temenos to implement the core banking solution within a tight timeline. Temenos provided an expert services team that worked on-site in Israel and Malta for several months to train key stakeholders from Finaro’s risk, commercial and finance teams on the functionality of the new solutions before and after the go-live.

Open Banking and Instant Payments; an essential partnership

“Temenos has been a great partner, supporting us through every step of our deployment. Temenos provides excellent support resources, and we know we can reach their team by email or phone if we ever need additional guidance. The built-in Model Bank functionality also made it easy for us to achieve our compliance goals and shortened the implementation timeline.”

Senior Product Manager, Finaro

Delivering an end-to-end service

Supported by Temenos, Finaro is achieving its strategic goal of providing a frictionless, end-to-end experience for e-commerce merchants. The core platform allows the company to develop customised banking products, and offer its clients the option of setting up a transactional bank account alongside their merchant account for acquiring and payments processing.

Senior Product Manager concludes: “We set ourselves the huge challenge of moving into a totally new area like banking. Working with Temenos has helped to ensure our transformation has been a major success. The Temenos platform gives us everything we need to expand our product portfolio and offer a greater level of flexibility to merchants using our acquiring and payments services. Looking ahead, we can already see many avenues that we hope to pursue with Temenos: from new cloud deployments to using open banking APIs to build value-add services.”

Temenos and Credorax deploy core banking platform in the cloud

Credorax and Temenos to offer best-in-class financial services to online merchants on the cloud

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