FairFX on track for full-year after 'strong' first half

Multi-currency payments and banking service FairFX updated the market on its trading for the six months ended 30 June on Friday, reporting a “strong” first half of trading, with “substantial growth” and the launch of new products.

The AIM-traded firm said that against that background, strong margins had been maintained and rationalisation of the supply chain was delivering results.

Turnover for the first half was up 146.2% year-on-year to £1.1bn, in line with management expectations.

On a like for like basis, excluding the acquired entities of Cardonebanking and City Forex, turnover for the first half was ahead 22.8% to £532.9m.

Like-for-like turnover from prepaid cards and international payments rose 8.5% to £181.7m and 39.1% to £334.6m respectively.

FairFX said international payments turnover for the group improved 131.6% year-on-year, supported by additional volumes from City Forex, which also achieved year-on-year turnover growth of 39%.

Since acquiring City Forex in February, the board said the successful migration of FairFX's international payments to the City Forex platform had given it increased opportunities to scale through the platform's straight-through-processing capability.

Usage of the company's corporate card platform rose 28.3% year on year, with the board saying that a “strong focus” on sales and marketing of the product was now gaining traction, and formed a “key pillar” of its overall offering to the small-to-medium enterprise customer base.

On the retail card and travel money side of the business, the board said its focus remained to grow turnover while maintaining margins through targeted marketing and an improved user experience.

The incorporation of the City Forex travel cash division into the group was said to be helping achieve that, through maximising cross-selling opportunities.

In addition, as the group now controlled the entire supply chain for the travel money business, it was extracting synergies and efficiencies.

Within the banking division, the Fair Everywhere business account was recently launched, bringing together the expertise of FairFX in international payments and Cardone's banking capabilities.

The company said the account was designed to make global business banking easier, faster and cheaper for those who did not want borders to limit their business ambitions.

It said the launch of Fair Everywhere marked the start of a number of banking products planned for release in the coming months.

The focus for the second half of 2018 would be to continue the strategy of extracting efficiencies via scale, whilst evolving the banking products for SMEs.

In addition, the board said it would be continuing to identify and maximise the numerous cross-selling opportunities.

It said the strong first half gave it confidence that the company would achieve market expectations for the full financial year.

“The performance of FairFX during the first half of 2018 demonstrates the execution of the company's strategy to scale its core FX services whilst evolving the digital banking offering,” said FairFX chief executive officer Ian Strafford-Taylor.

“The substantial growth in turnover has also been achieved without reduced margins and this gives us great confidence for the prospects for 2018 and beyond.”