Category: Remittance

Wirecard and Western Union Streamline Money Transfer In India

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Wirecard has announced an agreement with Weizmann Forex, Western Union`s agent in India, to provide money transfers in India.

The service will be released to thousands of locations across all major cities and districts in India, as a part of the 150,000-strong SmartShop agent network of Wirecard in India. These agents provide access to financial services and retail-assisted ecommerce to people who do not have internet access, smartphones or bank accounts.

Through the SmartShop agent network, people will be able to receive remittances from Western Union even in rural areas of India, immediately after the money has been wired by the sender. Locations that the company is adding Western Union Money Transfer services to will also include travel agencies, foreign exchange houses and locations that currently focus on domestic remittances.

According to PR Newswire, India’s digital payments market is expected to more than double to reach USD 470 billion by 2020, making India the world’s largest recipient of remittances (World Bank estimates approximately USD 62.7 billion had been sent to India in 2016).

Circle Launches Fee-Free Cross Border Payments

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Circle Internet Finacnial, a payments blockchain startup, has announced the launch of no–cost cross-border transactions to its users.

As part of the roll-out of the startup’s service upgrade, customers in the US, much of Europe and the UK will not have to pay fees or mark-ups on foreign currency exchanges. The company also provides instant transactions for users that send funds between these countries.

The upgrade comes after the startup cringed from its Bitcoin buying and selling services, though at the time the startup said it still planned to use blockchain behind the scenes, as Coindesk states.

Fiserv Announces More Banks to Join Zelle Platform

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Fiserv has announced that several banks and credit unions will join Zelle, a P2P payments network from Early Warning.

Citizens Bank, Dollar Bank, First National Bank of Pennsylvania and SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union will join the P2P network through Turnkey Service provided by Fiserv. Previously announced clients include Ally Bank, Bank of the West and BECU.

The Zelle payments network allows customers to send funds from one bank to another using only a recipient’s email address of mobile number. The Turnkey solution by Fiserv centralizes all the P2P services into a single platform.

The Digital Person-to-Person Payments in the U.S.: The Competitive Landscape report by Aite Group shows that financial institutions held 83% of the digital P2P market share in 2016, while alternative payment providers had 17%. The report has also revealed that in 2015 cash and checks were the preferred method of American consumers for P2P payments, highlight that there is room for online payments expansion.

Four Australian banks to use SWIFT gpi

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Swift has announced that it has implementation plans in place with four of Australia’s major banks to implement is gpi service.

The four banks named, being Commonwealth Bank, Westpac Bank, ANZ Bank and National Australia Bank have all been reportedly signed up to go live or planning the implementation phases.

SWIFT gpi seeks to improve the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing the speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments.

Over 110 transaction banks from Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Americas are already signed up to use the service and more are expected to join. Thousands of cross-border payments are today being sent using this new standard, bringing immediate benefits to gpi banks and their corporate customers.

Now live, the first phase of SWIFT gpi focuses on business-to-business payments, helping corporates grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies. Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can today receive an enhanced  payments service from their  banks, with following key features:

  • Faster, same day use of funds*
  • Transparency of fees
  • End-to-end payments tracking
  • Remittance information transferred unaltered

GPI concept

The second phase of SWIFT gpi will enable the digital transformation of cross-border payments, by allowing banks to:

  • Immediately stop a payment, no matter where it is in the correspondent banking chain.
  • Transfer rich payment data along with the payment, including additional line item details necessary for compliance checks, in an effort to enhance the reconciliation of a payment with multiple invoices.
  • Use an international payment assistant, to further increase the straight-through-processing rate of cross-border payments, at origination.

For its third phase, SWIFT gpi is already exploring the potential of using new technologies such as distributed ledger technology, in the cross-border payments process.

The announcement is related to SWIFT’s release of a cross-border payments tracker on May 23rd. Since then, gpi service has been used by more than 20 global transaction banks.

TransferWise removing borders

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TransferWise, the UK-based payments money transfer company, is launching a new service allows customers to make cross-border payments in a wide range of currencies.

TransferWise has implemented a “borderless scheme” to improve the efficiency of sending money around the globe. The service will initially only be available for small businesses and freelancers in the UK and Europe, and will be available to those in the US next month.

This type of function will allow businesses who are challenged with moving money from one country to another an alternative to a normal bank transfer process or even PayPal. Normally global financial institutions such as Citibank and HSBC for example, offer such schemes to their customers.