Harbor Integrates With Circle To Provide Faster Payments To Global Buyers And Suppliers
November 11, 2021
Source: Harbor
Trade finance provider integrates with Circle’s payments and treasury infrastructure solutions and uses USDC to efficiently convert digital assets to fiat and optimize treasury management.
DELRAY BEACH, FLA. – Harbor, a fintech company redefining international trade finance, announced an integration with Circle, a global internet finance firm that provides payments and financial infrastructure to businesses of all sizes and the principal operator of USD Coin (USDC).
By integrating the HarborTrade platform with Circle’s suite of APIs, Harbor uses USDC to efficiently and securely convert digital assets to fiat. This enables Harbor to provide faster payments to global buyers and suppliers as well as manage the fund’s treasury.
USDC is the world’s fastest-growing, regulated and fully-reserved dollar digital currency, with more than $33 billion in circulation and more than $1.3 trillion in on-chain transactions over the last year.
“Circle is the way to go for payment solutions where large volumes of payments can be processed 24/7 at minimal transaction cost,” said Andy Suen, chief operating officer at Harbor.
“We’ve already realized cost and operational efficiency with 50 percent of our transactions. Most importantly, Circle's API-first approach and their seamless integration with blockchains will help Harbor achieve our growth targets as our transaction volume is expected to reach an annual run rate of $300 million by the end of 2022,” Suen said.
Harbor’s core focus is to provide working capital in international markets through trade finance and began embracing DeFi in its infrastructure in 2020. Harbor originates, structures, manages, and provides liquidity for trade finance programs on the HarborTrade platform.
Harbor manages an on-chain securitization vehicle that originates USD trade receivables, bridging the real economy of international trade with liquidity providers who subscribe to the fund and invest DAI .
The fund is directly integrated with a MakerDao vault for liquidity. Maker provides a revolving line of credit against real-world assets as held by the fund. This direct integration allows Harbor to lock collateral in a Maker vault, withdraw DAI, and use it to finance new originations.
One of Harbor’s top priorities is to find efficiencies to speed up payments to suppliers and deliver valuable working capital. Since Harbor’s treasury is in DAI while originated assets are in fiat, there is a need for Circle’s robust on-and-off-ramp solutions.
“Knowing that Circle is helping Harbor address working capital challenges in the global supply chain is exciting,” said Jeremy Allaire, Co-founder and CEO of Circle. “We’re thrilled that our technology and USDC are creating efficiencies and contributing to easing some of the supply change challenges our world is facing.”
About Harbor
Harbor is a trade finance provider offering working capital solutions for businesses involved in cross border trade. Their programs include supply chain finance, receivables finance and inventory finance – end to end solutions covering the entire cash conversion cycle.
Harbor’s proprietary platform makes trade finance more streamlined and accessible for small and middle market businesses. In addition to working capital, the HarborTrade platform offers automation tools to improve visibility and operational efficiency among trading partners.
About Circle
Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is the principal operator of USD Coin (USDC), the leading dollar digital currency powering always-on internet-native commerce and payments with a circulation greater than $33 billion and over $1.3 trillion in on-chain transactions. Today, Circle's transactional services, business accounts, and platform APIs are giving rise to a new generation of financial services and commerce applications that hold the promise of raising global economic prosperity for all through the frictionless exchange of financial value. Additionally, Circle operates SeedInvest, one of the largest startup fundraising platforms in the U.S., which is a registered broker dealer. Learn more at https://circle.com.
