How Trade Nation unlocked new business and increased deposits by 260% with BVNK
Trade Nation is a globally regulated broker with an online trading platform for investors. The broker has customers all over the world, but has seen particular growth in Asia and Latin America.
The challenge: unlocking growth in Asia
Trade Nation offers foreign exchange and CFD trading accounts to retail and business investors, but its customers in Asia were struggling to top up their trading wallets using traditional payment methods.
In some countries for example, cards weren’t valid for international transactions or transactions were blocked by card providers. Bank payments meanwhile had to be manually processed by Trade Nation, which didn’t enable time-sensitive trading.
Teething problems with cryptocurrency payments
Because of the strong adoption of cryptocurrencies in the region, the payments team at Trade Nation enabled crypto deposits with an initial payments partner, but soon started to get customer complaints.
Trade Nation’s Head of Payments, Tariq Ahmed, explained: “We discovered a lot of friction in the payment journeys. This meant a lot of back and forth trying to resolve issues, payment delays and unhappy customers.”
In one example, customer payments were failing because of a mismatch in the amount sent by the customer and amount received by Trade Nation’s payments partner.
Tariq explained: “Our users would select to pay in cryptocurrency, and go to their wallet – for example with a central exchange. Many exchanges deduct a small fee, so it’s common that the amount we receive is less than the amount our customer sent. Our payments provider at the time rejected those underpayments, which wasn’t a good customer experience and meant we had to reach out to customers to resolve the issue.”
The solution: DLT Payments with BVNK
As a regulated financial services provider, Trade Nation needed a partner that could solve their payment issues and demonstrate strong risk and compliance credentials.
Tariq and his team decided to switch providers to BVNK.
“It’s important to us to be able to show our regulators that we are working with fully licensed, competent and compliant partners – with BVNK, we were able to do that.”
BVNK’s DLT Payments API integrates with Trade Nation’s hosted payments page to enable customer deposits and withdrawals in 14 digital currencies, including USDT and bitcoin.
“BVNK’s integration with Praxis Cashier is very good, and covers all the features we need,” said Tariq. “As a head of payments, I meet sales people all the time. Of course, it’s their job to tell you how great their products are, but until you really start using it, you don’t know if it will live up to those expectations. With BVNK we’ve had a fantastic experience using the platform and we really do see the difference, compared with others we’ve tried.”
The impact: more deposits and less overheads
Importantly for Tariq and his team, BVNK’s platform also manages under- and over- payments, without rejecting the payment and frustrating the customer. Tariq reports that this feature has significantly reduced support tickets and saved his team at least 12 hours a month.
Since launching with BVNK, Trade Nation has seen an increase in cryptocurrency deposits and around 56% of the broker's deposit volumes in new markets are now paid in cryptocurrencies.
"Our partnership with BVNK has unlocked new business opportunities for us in Asia. We’ve seen the impact straight away, both in the increase in deposits and the positive feedback from customers. BVNK’s service is reliable, the payment journey is smooth, conversion rates are good and we’ve had fewer failures and rejections.”
New opportunities: repatriating funds
Trade Nation also collects funds from customers in fiat currencies across Asia, and is now using BVNK’s Global Settlement Network to help repatriate them.
Said Tariq: “BVNK’s global network and multi-currency support has enabled us to move local funds we’ve accumulated across borders to our corporate bank accounts in the UK and Europe, quickly and efficiently. We believe BVNK will play an important role in supporting our treasury operations across Africa and Asia going forward.”
