How Equals Money is safeguarding SMBs from volatile markets

We spoke to Chief Product Officer James Simcox to hear how market conditions are impacting FX providers and their customers.

Equals Money holds a rare position in fintech, sitting firmly at the intersection between FX, international payments, and expense management. This offers Equals Money a unique perspective on emerging market trends and their impact on small businesses, a large share of its customer base. Read on to learn more from Equals Money’s Chief Product Officer, James Simcox, or watch the entire webinar on-demand here.

Insight #1: There’s an education gap when it comes to the financial solutions available to SMBs

As the threat of a recession looms, many SMBs face increased pressure to make better-informed decisions and shore up vulnerabilities. However, as James identifies, business owners are often unaware of many of the options available to them. For instance, forward contracts, the concept of locking in an exchange rate for a future purchase or sale of currency, allow businesses to protect themselves from currency volatility and plan ahead without locking away a significant share of their cash flow. After all, “you can’t plan ahead for your business if you don’t know how much things are going to cost in six months,” explains James. 

Unfortunately, many SMBs don’t even know that contracts like this exist.

All the time, our sales teams call up SMBs, and they’ve never even been sold the concept of buying a forward contract before.

Insight #2: FX providers help SMBs overcome supply chain issues and expand their customer base

The turbulent economic environment is seeing small businesses having to adapt rapidly to a myriad of challenges. In particular, supply chain issues have recently impacted many of Equals Money’s customers. James explains, “we see our customers looking all over the place to find new suppliers for random parts that they weren’t expecting to have to buy.” 

Equals Money offers a wide range of currencies, allowing businesses to overcome their supply chain challenges by sourcing products from new markets. It also enables them to reach a new, international customer base. “As business conditions change, businesses can move where they are paying to and where they are supplying to really quickly and know they’ll get full value for that transfer.”

Insight #3: Accounting integrations are Equals Money’s “most requested feature

Equals Money has built much of its product with its SMB customer base in mind, most of which rely on accounting platforms like Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage to close their books at the end of every month. It’s no real surprise, then, that accounting integrations are Equals Money’s “most requested feature”. 

Equals Money uses Codat’s technology to offer its customers the ability to integrate seamlessly with their accounting platforms. During the webinar, James explained the value this has for Equals Money’s customers:

Being able to bring our expense management product into our customers’ accounting platforms means that our customers don’t have to worry about keeping track of their spending elsewhere. Instead, they can keep their Finance team operating out of one product.”

As a business, Equals Money is entirely focused on delivering fantastic payments and card products to its customers. While, as James admits, the Equals Money team could have spent considerable time, money, and effort building out 15 different accounting integrations, this would “make absolutely no sense”, and distract attention away from Equals Money’s important mission. “Building this functionality through Codat means we only have to do one integration with one supplier.”

It’s clear that fintechs will play a crucial role in helping SMBs adapt to the changing macroeconomic environment in the coming months. To discover how Codat can help you create innovative solutions to support your SMB customers during these challenging times, please complete the contact form below.