Cross border payments

Alipay wants to leverage the millions of Chinese customers who travel abroad by offering them services in different parts of the world.

The company's original markets are India and China, but it plans to reach 10 major markets for B-to-B cross-border payments in the next year.

FleetCor Technologies, with broad operations in fleet cards and payroll solutions, has announced plans to purchase Cambridge Global Payments, which specializes in cross-border business-to-business payments, for $675 million.

U.K.-based TransferWise has enabled online customer verification at its new Asia Pacific base in Singapore, so users need not visit an office to set up an account with TransferWise's cross-border funds-transfer service.

In working with correspondent banks in developing countries for more than two decades, INTL FCStone Ltd. spent a fair amount of time collecting market information over the phone and through e-mail from those banks to share with others. It ultimately determined there was a better way to do this.

The B-to-B payments market is ripe for digital innovation. Here are some of the most recent moves to bring B-to-B payments up to speed.

While Germany's Wirecard AG in recent years has been steadily racking up a deep portfolio of payments technology fused with banking services through a white-label approach, it has also quietly established a global business through acquisition.

TransferWise Ltd., the London-based startup backed by investors including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, is bringing its international money transfer service to Singapore, aiming to shake up banks’ dominance of the market.

There has been a lot of activity lately around modernizing cross-border transfers through the use of blockchain and and cloud-hosted technology, but despite the potential savings in cost and time, none of these methods has caused a meaningful decline in the use of cash.

Kosta Peric, deputy director of digital payments and financial services for the poor at the Gates Foundation, discusses his efforts to expand access to low-cost financial services in developing countries.