Visa, Brightwell Expand X-Border Payment Partnership to Allow Bank Account and Wallet Payouts

Brightwell is using Visa Direct to allow payouts to eligible bank accounts and wallets worldwide.

The collaboration makes Brightwell — a cross-border payment-focused FinTech — the first Visa-enablement platform provider in North America to offer all cross-border payment modalities provided by Visa Direct, according to a Wednesday (Jan. 17) press release.

“The implementation of Visa Direct’s account and wallet payment capabilities expands our network to more than 8.5B endpoints capability in 160 currencies,” Brightwell CEO Larry Hipp said in the release. “This gives Brightwell the ability to send money across borders to eligible cards, bank accounts and wallets around the world. Through our collaboration with Visa, we bring more payment options and reach to our banking, program manager and corporate clients.”

Wednesday’s announcement marked the continuation of a longer partnership between Visa and Brightwell, which teamed last year to help customers launch cross-border payments programs.

Announced in March, that collaboration enables the use of Visa Direct through Brightwell’s ReadyRemit platform, “making it easier for FinTechs, money transmitters, and prepaid and banking providers to enable real-time push payments to 3 billion cards around the world,” PYMNTS wrote at the time.

These efforts are happening amid a jump in cross-border payments around the world. A new paper by the U.S. Faster Payments Council found that in the past decade, the volume and value of cross-border payments have risen by a respective 61% and 37%, according to data from the Bank of International Settlements.

“To keep pace with financial institutions, payments infrastructure must continuously adapt and change for new technologies, new industry initiatives, mandates, and regulatory and compliance directives,” the council wrote.

However, research by PYMNTS Intelligence found that less than a quarter of smaller companies believe that current cross-border payment solutions are very or extremely satisfactory, a finding that leaves the majority of businesses wanting more.

“Cross-border payments’ processing times are hardly standardized, which in turn means that SMBs have challenges with cash flow visibility,” PYMNTS wrote. “The payments systems are far-flung and have different reporting standards, and the migration to ISO 20022 has been staggered out into several stages and across a timeframe stretching out across the next several months.”

Against this backdrop, additional PYMNTS data showed that two-thirds of financial institutions said they are either very or extremely willing to invest in new technology to deal with cross-border B2B pain points.