Shawbury Wine

Shawbury Wine wanted a platform that would allow them to easily make multi-currency international payments from their sterling-based account.

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About Shawbury Wine

Shawbury Wine is a family-owned business operating for nearly a quarter of a century. It works directly with small wine producers across the world to import wine into the UK.

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The Challenge

Shawbury Wine works with wine producers across 3 continents, making payments from sterling into multiple other currencies including euro, New Zealand dollar, and South African rand.

“We work with producers in Spain, Italy, France, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa – really, all those countries you’d associate with great wine” said Anna Newman, Company Director, Shawbury Wine. “And one of our jobs is to make sure they’re paid accurately, on-time, and without any problems. It’s important to build and keep relationships in this industry, and we don’t want any of the technical processes like payments to get in the way of that.”

Working in multiple currencies meant that Shawbury Wine wanted to have a payment platform that made sure currency-to-currency payments were accurate, easy to make, and would transfer quickly to the suppliers, particularly during peak times.

“Summer and Christmas are our busiest times, and we’d be making several payments a week to our suppliers around then. You don’t want any snags like inaccurate or delayed payments, as that can have a direct impact on our business back here in the UK, as well as those supplier relationships.”

In the past, they used traditional correspondent banking rails to make these payments, which was proving to be costly, slow, and could result in inaccurate payments.

“I’ve been using TransferMate for years now, I can hardly remember the old way of doing it. People are always trying to sell me different solutions all the time, but I tend not to pay attention, because why change when you’re happy, right? From that, you can surmise that we weren’t happy with the old system and that’s why we made the change to TransferMate.”

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The Solution

Shawbury Wine use the TransferMate Platform to make their supplier payments. An online portal, they simply log on whenever they want to pay a supplier and in their chosen currency.

“The platform is easy to use, seamless. It works exactly for what I need it to do. It’s very efficient from my own time perspective, great in terms of transfer speeds, and I’ve always trusted the rate.”

A core feature of the TransferMate Platform is the ability to make payments from one currency to another with built-in exchange rate calculations, meaning the payment is always accurate. This can save considerable back-and-forth work in sending additional payments to make up for any shortfall.

“It’s one of those aspects of my work that I don’t have to think about, which is really what you want from a payment platform. We’ve never had any issues from the supplier side, so everyone is happy along the entire chain.”

The system is built on the foundation of TransferMate’s global payment infrastructure, meaning funds travel directly from payer to payee, and aren’t handled by any 3rd parties along the way. This brings a few benefits, from eliminating any hidden fees to ensuring the payments are received quickly.

“We’ve saved money because of the rates, but the main saving really is our time. Start to finish, a payment probably takes 3-4 minutes. And you’ve recently upgraded the system so payments arrive even faster, so that makes the suppliers happy too, and means less checking and following up for everyone.”

Another benefit for the Shawbury Wine team was the efficient customer service. As a small team, it was important to be able to contact real people and get prompt solutions they could action.

“If I've ever had a problem, somebody's responded to me, emailed me, phoned me immediately, and sorted it out. And really, those issues have been from our end, which makes it even better to get a quick resolution.”

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The Final Word

“The TransferMate platform is simple, fast, and I’d definitely recommend it to any business making international payments.”

- Anna Newman, Company Director, Shawbury Wine

To improve how you pay internationally, sign up to the TransferMate Platform here, or contact the team for a demo.