Bitfinex today announced a collaboration with fiat on-ramp services provider OpenPayd to round out its real-time payment capabilities in Europe.
The partnership enables Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payments for euro-denominated deposits and withdrawals. SEPA instant is a more efficient and obviously faster means to transfer Euros, which Bitfinex anticipates will grow their transactional base much faster than the use of SWIFT.
OpenPayd’s BaaS platform includes many features specifically designed for digital asset businesses. Among other things, it allows them to automate the process of receiving fiat deposits and initiating fiat withdrawals from and to their customers via SEPA, SEPA Instant and SWIFT.
Crucially, with Bitfinex having access to the SEPA Instant payment scheme, its customers are now able to top up their fiat wallets in real time. This also provides additional options for Bitfinex customers to deploy euros onto the platform and have the ability to pay-in and pay-out from their accounts near-instantly.
In addition, OpenPayd’s virtual IBANs can be directly embedded into their customer platforms’’ back end, which helps reduce reconciliation errors and significantly speeds up the payment processing time.
The multi-phase collaboration is part of Bitfinex’s ambition to offer a one-stop-shop for its customers’ banking and payments needs. It also enables the crypto platform to embed a suite of financial services into its user experience, driving increased processing speeds and reducing operational costs.
Commenting on this, Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex, said: “We chose to work with OpenPayd because of its ability to help us access SEPA real-time payment rails and the speed of integration its API enables. This collaboration forms part of our continued efforts to provide a premium customer service experience to our growing user base.”
“The vision of embedded finance is to create a world where anyone building disruptive financial products can simply plug-and-play a fully-functional payments platform and access all the benefits that come with them and this is exactly what we’ve enabled for Bitfinex,” added Iana Dimitrova, CEO of OpenPayd.
“We’re thrilled to be helping one of the world’s largest digital token exchanges to bridge the gap between fiat and crypto. It’s critical that Bitfinex and its customers have access to real-time payment rails and benefit from both improved customer experience and improve their potential to scale.”
