As we have often commented, foreign exchange services and their true value remain somewhat niche.
This is for a number of reasons chief among which is a realisation that any outward looking business or individual with an overseas agenda (whatever that means) can reasonably make use of a specialist currency broker.
This means we have an enormous market place in which to operate, but, it also means it is incredibly difficult to define one's self to broad enough appeal to entice that whole market.
Most brokers chose to focus on cold calling and network marketing.
By network marketing we mean engendering sufficient goodwill amongst our client base to induce them to refer work to us.
Please remember, we are competing with vast global financial institutions.
These institutions have the greatest market share largely because they align their international payment offering with the every day banking services they already apply.
A bank competing for your business is not just hoping to provide you with savings, investments and borrowing services, they are also selling you their international payment services too, but, the former tend to mean that the latter proposition is implicitly taken care of.
Just by Googling anything terms to do with sending money abroad you will find a vast array of 'specialist' non bank providers of currency services.
Most of these services cater for remittance based activity. A remittance is quite simply the transmission of money in one currency to an account abroad.
The customer is not necessarily expressly engaging in a currency exchange, they simply want to send what they have earned 'here' to someone or somewhere else and, usually, this means workers in the UK sending some of their earnings 'back home' or to family.
In the same way that an independent coffee shop might struggle to achieve broad high street penetration because of the buying power of larger chains, independent brokers like Prime Cap cannot reasonably hope to compete with publicly listed multi-national transfer businesses.
We cannot reasonably afford to compete through the most main stream channels...online. Our budgets simply don't stretch to out pricing larger companies.
On a like for like basis we would expect to beat any larger institution, for a number of reasons, but, when it comes to catching your eye and dominating marketing channels, we have to think and operate differently.
Prime Cap chooses to focus on engaging advisers to our target client.
A solicitor is unlikely to look online for a currency solution for their customer, but, if we meet them in person we stand a good chance of personalising our service to such an extent that we are more memorable or compelling that just a website or a print media advertisement.
On the basis that a company like Prime Cap is not trying to compete for online traffic, we can look a little more closely at how we differentiate ourselves from amongst the plethora of independent brokers that have similar aims to us.
One such way is through our pledge to give more to our clients give back to our partners.
As a boutique we are confident that we know our clients in a more personal and intimate way than many of our peers might.
For one thing, the larger the organisation the more of an essential priority the transaction becomes.
Bigger businesses need more commercial calories to sustain them.
Whilst wouldn't turn down the opportunity to grow our operation, such is the structure we have created that we do not have superfluous non-client facing staff.
Every one within our organisation needs to be able to understand our offering and services as expertly as their colleagues.
As a small team we have to be able to rely on the fact that any one of our staff picking up the telephone can and will counsel our clients with the same tact, dexterity and manner.
This is part of the intense pursuit of value at every angle that we are proud of.
On principle we want to work with as few referring partners as we can.
This obviously sounds counter intuitive because the more referral partners we have the more business we get. But, we don't necessarily see it like that.
If our referral partner has consistent traffic for personal and business foreign exchange needs then we want to focus our energy on making sure that every single one of those clients gets the optimal service.
Referral partners of Prime Cap are not referral partners of the individual broker within our organisation. They are a referral partner of the firm.
Spreading oneself too thinly not only means gaps or cracks appear in the process, but, the enthusiasm and diligence with which one approaches engagements with myriad of partners lessens the more of them there are.
One way to truly cement a relationship is to refer a client to someone.