Visa and TransferWise look to expand cross-border payments access

Visa has announced that TransferWise, a technology company providing international payments, will begin offering its small business and individual customers an additional capability to move money to debit cards in real-time. The integrated service, initially available in Spain, is also planned to go live in Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria. The company plans to continue to collaborate with Visa and scale its offering using Visa Direct, throughout Europe and globally in 2020.

“Technology is bringing us closer together, yet there are still challenges that it hasn’t solved when it comes to individuals and small businesses moving money around the world” said Bill Sheley, SVP and global head of Visa Direct. “The TransferWise collaboration is the latest addition to Visa’s efforts to help our clients enable individuals and small businesses to send and receive international payments quickly and securely by utilising the power of Visa Direct”.

Visa has been working with financial institutions, technology partners and remittance firms, including EMQ, MoneyGram, and Remitly, to bring Visa Direct functionality to market around the world – reaching accounts via push to card capabilities in over 200 countries – all via a single connection point.

The firm also recently acquired Earthport, a large independent ACH network. Visa says the combined offering will give Visa Direct clients the ability to push payments to the majority of the world’s banked population through a single connection. This is a key element of Visa’s proclaimed goal to being a single connection point – a network of networks – for thousands of financial institutions and billions of user endpoints around the world.