Barclays and TransferMate Streamline International Receivables for UK Businesses

Barclays and TransferMate are collaborating on a new international receivables solution for U.K. businesses.

By leveraging TransferMate’s global payments infrastructure, the new solution will allow Barclays clients operating in British pounds (GBP) to invoice their customers in more than 60 currencies and 67 countries and receive the payment back in GBP, the companies said in a Friday (May 5) blog post.

“From manufacturing and leisure to education and healthcare, our partnership with TransferMate will enable clients from numerous industries to offer a new payment method to their customers whilst achieving reconciliation benefits and reduced banking fees for their businesses,” Martin Runow, global head of payments, FX and digital at Barclays Transaction Banking, said in the post.

In a recent pilot of the new offering, Barclays higher education clients were able to invoice their international students in GBP while the students were able to pay in their local currency, according to the blog post.

In addition, all payments are automatically matched to the invoiced amount, so there is no need for manual reconciliation, the post said.

“This innovative solution can help Barclays customers reduce their transaction costs when receiving international payments, eliminate manual reconciliation, and always know the amount billed will be the amount received,” TransferMate CEO Sinead Fitzmaurice said in the post. “It’s another great example of how collaboration between banks and FinTechs can improve the customer experience and redefine how money is moved around the world.”

TransferMate is working to inform and educate banks, software and other FinTech firms that “there is a much easier way to transfer money internationally than making cross-border payments on SWIFT,” TransferMate Founder and Chairman Terry Clune told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June 2022.

There is also increasing opportunity in the payments collection vertical, particularly in the global education arena, where universities collecting tuition payments from international students have been hit with huge transfer costs, Clune said at the time.

“In the past, they used to make those payments by credit card, which would be hit with a 2% to 3% interchange fee,” Clune said. “But using our infrastructure [removes that fee from the] transaction value and brings huge savings to organizations.”