- New collaboration will be aimed at a number of major economies including Spain and then later Bulgaria and the Czech Republic
- It will focus on the Visa Direct product, and the partnership will be enhanced and built on across 2020
- “Integrating Visa Direct further eases the transfer process and brings us another step closer to achieving our mission”, said TransferWise spokesperson
One of the biggest names in the finance world has announced a new partnership with payments technology platform TransferWise.
Visa said that it would work alongside TransferWise by treating the latter as one of its “remittance partners”, meaning that customers of its Visa Direct service will now find it easier to institute cross border payments.
The service looks set to begin in Spain, although there are plans for other European countries to soon benefit from the service as well.
Believed to be on the list of target destinations are Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic.
According to a press release, TransferWise wants to continue working alongside Visa for the foreseeable future – and intends to do so across the world in 2020.
In a statement, Bill Sheley – who is the SVP and global head of Visa Direct – said that the move was all part of an effort to make international payments happen “quickly and securely”.
“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”, he said.
“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 utilizing the power of Visa Direct”, he added.
For TransferWise, Kristo Käärmann – who is CEO and co-founder – argued that this brought the firm “closer to achieving” its mission.
“TransferWise is on a mission to move money around the world in a cost efficient, quick and transparent way”, he said.
“Integrating Visa Direct further eases the transfer process and brings us another step closer to achieving our mission”, he added.
Visa Direct is a push payment solution which has been on the go for a while.
It claims to have processed two billion transactions altogether over the last year, and it works alongside a wide range of other institutions in order to bring about faster and cheaper money transfers.
TransferWise is already a big brand name in its own right, and it’s known across the remittance services sector as a key node in many transactions.
However, as this partnership shows, it’s still valuable for relatively small firms such as TransferWise to collaborate with the sorts of larger organisations that can really add value and bring big boosts in the form of technology, access to market and much more – and it’s only likely that this sort of partnership will become more and more common as time goes on.
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