March 22 (SeeNews) - French payment services provider iBanFirst targets a twofold increase in international payments in its Bulgarian operations to over 500 million euro ($539.3 million) this year, the company said on Wednesday.
In 2022, its first year of operations on the Bulgarian market, iBanFirst processed transactions for Bulgarian companies worth 250 million euro, it said in a press release.
The fintech beat its revenue projections for its Bulgarian activities by 10%, country manager Dean Todorov told SeeNews in an interview last week.
The bulk of the company's clients in Bulgaria are active in the agriculture, wholesale, IT and retail sectors. The recent geopolitical upheaval drove clients involved in international trade to seek hedging tools to protect their profit margin from currency volatility. This led to a 100% quarter-on-quarter growth in risk management solutions last year, iBanFirst added.
"We can definitely say that Bulgaria is one of the most dynamic markets for us and a success story for the region. It is a result both of the local team, which has a solid expertise in the FX market, but especially of Bulgarian companies, which in the context of a challenging year, with war in Ukraine and high inflation, not only demonstrated their resilience, but have been able to increase their business activities across borders", iBanFirst regional director, Johan Gabriels, stressed.
This year, the Bulgarian office will focus on growing its client portfolio to facilitate international transactions for an even greater number of Bulgarian companies with foreign counterparties and to broaden the range of opportunities available to them. Bulgarian companies' foreign trade partners hail mostly from the EU, China and Turkey.
In 2022, iBanFirst expanded to 13 offices in Europe, covering France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the UK. The fintech group's overall transaction volumes exceed 1.5 billion per month.
($ = 0.9271 euro)