MoneyGram Teams With Japanese FinTech Smiles on Cross Border Payments

MoneyGram, which works with digital peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, announced Tuesday (Jan. 11) that it will partner with Digital Wallet Corporation on wider-spread payments.

Now, Japanese customers will be able to make use of the Smiles mobile app, owned by Digital Wallet Corporation, which allows sending of money to over 200 countries and territories.

“Partnering with leading fintech companies around the world is a critical component of our strategy, and we are thrilled to open our unique, global platform to one of the world’s fastest-growing FinTechs,” said Alex Holmes, MoneyGram chairman and CEO. “An increasing number of companies are looking to leverage our core capabilities to quickly add services and scale, and we continue to get excited about increasing payment volumes through our network and creating meaningful processing revenue in the years ahead.”

Digital Wallet President and CEO Eiji Miyakawa added that the company “is delighted to partner with MoneyGram in the rapidly-growing, cross-border money transfer and payments market in Japan.”

“We believe the best way to reach and help our customers is through this collaboration with the respected MoneyGram brand and global network,” Miyakawa continued. “Digital Wallet is looking forward to a successful strategic partnership with MoneyGram.”

MoneyGram has become the forefront to the digital kind of P2P payments. Last month, PYMNTS reported that MoneyGram has been working alongside Paytm in order to roll out new ways to send money directly to Indian Paytm wallets.

See also: Paytm Helps MoneyGram Tap Into $83B Indian Market

The report says MoneyGram’s digital transactions represent around half of all transactions in India.

At the time, Holmes said the company was “thrilled to partner with Paytm Payments Bank to expand our mobile wallet capabilities into one of the largest receive markets in the world.”

He added that the digitization of the receive network was a key part of “our growth strategy which has led to exceptional results including an all-time high in our total transactions received digitally in the third quarter of this year.”