- New partnership with ACU increases exposure to SMEs
- Veem adds to third-party integration after teaming with EliteWork, Cargocentric and Springboard VR
Veem, the international money transfers service for small businesses, has announced a new partnership with America’s Credit Union (ACU), increasing its reach to thousands more small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
ACU will now link its own SME customers to Veem’s cross-border payments services. Commenting on the initiative, Olivier Veyrac, Vice President of Business Development at Veem, said: “What sets ACU apart from other financial institutions is their unique focus on people, not just on the numbers. We’re excited to work with them to ensure their members are able to send and receive money globally without the hassle and high fees most banks impose on small businesses.”
ACU’s 47,000 members will now have access to Veem’s powerful payment technology. The not for profit co-operative appears delighted with the move. Describing the new partnership as “awesome”, ACU Director of Business Services Kirsty Ybarra added: “We serve a market segment that banks often overlook: small businesses.
“By partnering with Veem, we are able to save our customers time and money. One member has shared that they expect to save $30,000 this year by using Veem. ACU is thrilled to be able to offer this kind of value to our members.”
Just three months ago in February, Veem announced a new expansion by integrating third parties with cross-border payments capabilities via its application programming interface (API). Within two months of the announcement, it began working with virtual staffing tool EliteWork, logistics firm Cargocentric, accountancy firm HireAthena and virtual reality business Springboard VR, all of whom integrated Veem’s international money transfers functions through its API.
Commenting on the API initiative, Veem’s Vice President of API Product Cheung Tam said: “We knew our API would be useful for companies of all kinds in need of global payment capabilities, but even we were surprised to see the variety of companies that found Veem and started to build using our API.
“We’re just a couple of months post-launch, and the success we’ve seen has been inspiring.”
The company has been steadily increasing the size of its commercial footprint. In September last year, it launched a collaboration with the accountancy firm Xero. The result was that Xero became able to automate the flow of payments data and execute cross-border transfers via the Veem platform.
Veem also netted a grand total of $25m in 2017 following a funding round led by National Australia Bank Ventures. Also participating were GVI and SBI Investment Co., so it’s pretty clear that Veem intends to become quite the rising star of the international money transfers industry.
ACU’s Veem-boosted services to small enterprises occurs at the same moment that the US Small Business Administration (SBA) turns to the credit union industry to revivify small business lending. At the start of the year, the SBA recommended raising the cap of assets that credit unions are permitted to invest in their SME members. Presently, they are prohibited from investing more than 12.5% of an SME’s total assets into loans. The SBA, however, reports that credit unions more than doubled their small enterprise lending activity between 2008 and 2016 to reach a total of $60bn. Meanwhile, over the same interval, bank lending to SMEs shrivelled by almost $100bn.
It seems likely that many small businesses will also see the new partnership as “awesome”.
