Leap Financial Integrates Visa Direct to Streamline Cross-Border Remittances

Digital remittance company Leap Financial has integrated the global money movement solution Visa Direct to streamline the direct delivery of funds to eligible cards, bank accounts and digital wallets worldwide.

With this integration, Leap Financial’s white-label digital remittances platform enables financial and non-financial institutions to offer seamless cross-border remittances, the company said in a Thursday (Feb. 27) press release.

The collaboration will initially focus on the U.S. and Latin America markets, according to the release.

Leap Financial’s technology reduces the cost of remittance fees to under 1% by streamlining remittance flows and eliminating inefficiencies, per the release.

“Our collaboration with Visa Direct will further enhance our ability to provide faster, more secure transactions, enabling our partners to offer competitive pricing and direct more funds to recipients,” Leap Financial CEO Lionel Carrasco said in the release.

Leap Financial announced in December that it raised $3.5 million in a seed round to respond to growing demand and new customers and to boost its artificial intelligence (AI) component to enable organizations to provide personalized services via AI agents.

“Leap was founded to help immigrants overcome disparity and change the 100-year-old ways that allow incumbents to take 10% cuts for check cashing services, 5% for simple international money transfers or drain bank accounts with shady fees from hard-working people who barely make a living,” Carrasco said at the time in a press release. “We can do better than that and still be able to make profits.”

In November 2023, Leap Financial introduced an AI assistant called Lola4i.com that helps recently arrived immigrants to the U.S. navigate laws to find work, housing, healthcare and more.

Visa reported in October that the number of Visa Direct transactions grew by 38% in its fiscal fourth quarter to reach 2.8 billion and that the year’s total number of Visa Direct transactions reached almost 10 billion.

FinTech Jack Henry said Feb. 3 that it began offering the Visa Direct service through its Jack Henry Rapid Transfers offering to facilitate the delivery of funds directly to eligible cards, bank accounts and wallets around the world.

In December, CARD.com, a FinTech specializing in mobile banking and card payments, tapped Visa Direct to make cross-border payments.