Founded: 2020

Products: Online hedging platform wrapped in modern UX.

Overview: Launched by Seth Phillips, CEO, and Dan Kindler, CTO (both Americans living in the UK) in 2020, Bound believes that most businesses and their treasurers understand that they can’t predict global FX markets. Its goal is to “make it easier for businesses to discover their currency risks and mitigate them quickly and simply online”. The set-up is cost-free for treasury and finance functions.

Bound is configured to:

• Convert at least 35 deliverable currencies
• Book open or closed forward contracts (deliverable or non-deliverable forwards)
• Set targets using forward-limit and/or forward-stop orders
• Spread risk by breaking large transactions into many small executions spread over long periods of time

These strategies can be quickly set in motion online, and automated where desired, with a self-serve option to enable users to increase, decrease, adjust or cancel hedges, and update foreign cash flow forecasts. Real-time analytics offers breakdowns of transactions, detailed statements, and performance reports.

The platform is API-ready for integration with third-party platforms, and is already connected to multiple banks and liquidity providers. It offers users “fair and fixed fees”, with the promise of no hidden costs or markups. Bound says it earns all revenues through fixed, pre-agreed spreads. These are reported on each trade to maintain transparency in execution.

Clients: 100+

Active region(s): UK, US, Europe

Partners: HSBC Innovation Banking, Barclays, Visa, and other private and public non-bank trading companies

Employees: 20+

Funding: In November 2021 Bound raised $6.5m seed funding. To date, it has secured $20m in venture financing from investors such as Album VC, Notion Capital, Valar Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, Presight Capital, and Victor Jacobsson, the Swedish independent entrepreneur who co-founded Klarna in 2005.

Ownership: Private. Venture-capital backed.

Unique selling point: “Protect and stabilise foreign cash flows in five minutes or less per month. We build highly automated hedging tools with low, transparent pricing.”

Website: bound.co

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 020 8064 0360

TMI view: A solution aimed at making currency risk management easy, sitting in the sweet spot somewhere between the high-risk strategy of doing nothing, and the hard work and intensity of developing in-house FX expertise.