How Bitstocks is disrupting the financial services marketplace with Gravity – a solution grounded in Modulr technology
Frustrated with the inefficiencies of the legacy banking system, Bitstocks set out to harness public ledger technology to create a new kind of financial ecosystem. The result is Gravity - a platform that offers a quick, easy and, above all, transparent way to access the bitcoin market.
Systemic inefficiencies addressed with innovative technology
A born entrepreneur, Bitstocks founder and CEO, Michael Hudson, started his first business in his early teens, but the systemic inefficiencies he experienced within the worlds of global commerce and financial services left him disillusioned.
After discovering bitcoin technology and seeing its potential to solve these critical shortcomings, Hudson established Bitstocks as the City of London’s first bitcoin market advisory and investment firm. Since then, the company has evolved into a fintech scale-up, dedicated to disrupting the marketplace by building the financial ecosystem of tomorrow, today.
Bitstocks’s Gravity solution is the first step on this evolutionary journey; a platform which will go onto offer its customers the everyday products and services they’d expect from traditional banking, but built on the immutable bitcoin blockchain.
“We had identified the fact that Bitstocks needed a fast and smart banking partner for our Gravity platform. We found Modulr online while researching technology-based banking partners, and our interest was piqued when we saw that Modulr provided an API alternative to traditional banking. It all came together and was a natural fit for us,” says Hudson.
And, Hudson had certainly found a like-minded partner. After all, it was similar inefficiencies that had frustrated Modulr’s founders in their previous businesses and inspired them to build the efficient, reliable and robust payments platform that underpins the Bitstocks solution today.
How Bitstocks uses Modulr
Harnessing the power of the Modulr platform, Bitstocks has put payments at the heart of its Gravity ecosystem; eliminating process inefficiencies and ensuring the way its users make payments is a secure, reliable and frictionless experience.
With Modulr’s fiat payments plumbing behind the scenes, users of Bitstocks’s Gravity platform can enjoy a frictionless front-end experience and first-class UI for buying and selling Bitcoin. Fiat and crypto* can be switched instantly and easily, with unrestricted deposits and withdrawals. Simple percentage selectors are used to indicate how much of the available funds users want to switch, while real-time quotations and instant settlement into accounts afford greater visibility. And, funds can be withdrawn at any time to a user’s bank or bitcoin wallet.
Embedded access to the UK Faster Payments Service and the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) enables Bitstocks to unlock faster, easier and more reliable ways to move money across the UK and Europe, all while Modulr takes on the technological and regulatory operations involved with plugging into the payments schemes.
“We had experienced challenges with the speed of GBP transactions within our Gravity platform - both inbound and outbound. BACS payments take up to 5 working days, and that was not going to work for us. CHAPS payments are undertaken the same day, but at a cost per transaction - so being able to secure Faster Payments rails was a key objective for us,” says Hudson.
Bitstocks has been able to leverage Modulr’s direct participation in the Faster Payments scheme and its direct relationship with the Bank of England to get a packaged and regulated service, thanks to Modulr’s partnership setup**.
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