Visa has expanded its Visa Direct platform to help businesses push payments to eligible cards for domestic payouts, and to eligible cards and bank accounts for cross-border payments.
The Visa Direct Payouts APIs are designed to reduce the complexities often associated with managing and sending money across multiple networks and intermediaries worldwide.
Users can move money globally through a single connection to VisaNet, enabling financial institutions, fintechs, remittance providers and corporate banks to capture new payment flows, says Visa.
The system supports real-time domestic and cross-border person-to-person, business-to-small business and business-to-consumer use cases, such as insurance disbursements, marketplace seller payouts, providing workers faster access to their earnings, as well as remittances.
Standard Chartered in Hong Kong is already using the technology to boost its retail international transfer services, while MoneyGram is improving money-movement optionality for its customers who are sending and receiving funds across borders.
Bill Sheley, SVP, global head, Visa Direct, says: "As digital commerce accelerates, Visa is innovating to give financial institutions, governments, individuals and businesses new ways to pay and get paid beyond the card.
"The launch of Visa Direct Payouts marks an important milestone in Visa’s expansion of its account-to-account capabilities to now reach an additional 2 billion bank accounts around the world."