Cross border payments

The international payments infrastructure has reached a point where consumers can use their cards in many parts of the world as easily as they can in their own country. But finding retailers who can accept all of these cards is a completely different story.

Today, you can sell anywhere in the world successfully with just a single payment gateway integration, writes Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.

Blockchain can power faster, cheaper and much more secure transactions, independent from governments, banks and national borders, writes Ali Hashem, an account manager at Dentacoin.

Cross-border e-commerce is seeing explosive growth, driving a race among payment providers and acquirers to equip online sellers with the technology to accept any kind of payment in virtually any region. Credit and debit cards are the dominant payment type North American merchants accept, but are much less common elsewhere.

Worldpay is combining the Worldpay Bankout solution, which will now deliver to 154 direct bank disbursement destinations, and Worldpay FastAccess enabled by Visa Direct.

The payment landscape is still very fragmented with local solutions holding their own against global giants and new technologies such as AI and blockchain keeping the payments market very enterprising, writes Eva Murphy Ryan, trade development executive for financial services and technology at Enterprise Ireland New York.

For all the media attention around the best options for cardholders when making transactions abroad, there's little focus on the lack of transparency on the costs involved with making a purchase in the local currencies where Visa, Mastercard and the issuers manage the conversion, argues Gino Ravaioli, chairman of the DCC Forum.

Despite the real-world use cases being found around blockchain and distributed ledger technology, banks are being warned to be cautious about committing to any such projects.

International migration has hit an all-time high in recent years, with 250 million migrant workers across the globe. This has created a booming new international payments market for remittance providers.

In monitoring the patterns of a North Korean cyberattack organization that has stolen more than $1.1 billion from global financial institutions since 2014, security firm FireEye says these hackers are still at work in targeting a bank's access to the Swift messaging network.

London-based TransferGo is using Ripple’s blockchain platform to support digital money transfers from Europe to India. But TransferGo isn’t the first remittance company to work with Ripple — and it isn't on the same path that others have taken.

China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is partnering with Saxo Payments Banking Circle, a European B2B payments platform specializing in online cross-border transfers.

The single-platform transfer is part of London-based Moneycorp's full integration of Commonwealth FX, a U.S.-based corporate international payments business it acquired at the start of the year —and part of a strategy to expand its U.S. market.

Singapore-based money transfer platform TransferTo is working with Stellar.org to facilitate low-cost blockchain-based cross-border remittances for underbanked and unbanked consumers in emerging markets.

South Korean cellular carrier LG Uplus, a unit of LG, says early next year it will launch a test of a blockchain-based overseas payment system.

At this year’s Swift Business Forum in New York, executives said banks can build "more intelligent routing" to speed up payments and reduce the cost of processing and delivery.

The payments company released a platform made up of nine B2B networks and powered by Microsoft’s Azure.

The payments technology that powers international trade is crucially important because it helps streamline the processes and trim the costs of conducting business overseas, according to Darren Hutchinson, head of commercial in the Americas for WorldFirst.

The highly lucrative remittance business, once the sole purview of established players with large agent-based locations such as Western Union and MoneyGram, is under an all-out attack by digital fintechs.

The popularity of technology-driven international transactions are making their way to TransferWise's balance sheet.