Visa and Thunes Expand Their Digital Wallet Collaboration to Asia and Africa
Asia and Africa are now part of the cooperation between Visa and cross-border payments company Thunes.
Through the new partnership, which was unveiled on Thursday, March 21, Visa will be able to send money to over 108 different digital wallet types and bank accounts across a number of nations, including Kenya, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Additionally, Thunes will put Visa Direct’s push-to-card functionality into practice, enabling payouts to qualified Visa cards and accounts in more than 190 nations and territories.
“Digital wallets are an easy-to-use, rapid, and secure payment method surging in popularity. More than 60% of the world’s population is expected to use them by 2026,” the companies said in a news release, noting that a growing number of banks are working with Visa to add cross-border payout capabilities to digital wallets.
“Increasingly, these financial institutions see mobile wallet interoperability as a vital way to optimize payments to their consumers and business customers,” the release said.
According to the statement, the partnership builds on Visa and Thunes’ initial October 2022 partnership to expand Visa Direct’s access to 1.5 billion digital wallets. Furthermore, in July of last year, Visa participated in Thunes’ $60 million Series C expansion round.
Recently, Visa signed a number of other agreements in this area, such as one with FinTech Brightwell, which uses Visa Direct to enable payments to qualified bank accounts and wallets on an international level.
Additionally, Visa and CIBC collaborated to make it easier for the bank’s customers to send money abroad to digital wallets located in the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Kenya, and other significant remittance destinations.
“Payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard are uniquely positioned to underpin the pivot toward better cross-border fund flows.” “Their networks have already scaled, and their endpoints and acceptance points already number in the billions.”
However, according to study intelligence, only 23% of smaller companies find the cross-border payment options available today to be “very or extremely satisfactory.”
Nevertheless, research indicates that between 2020 and 2021, cross-border payments sent or received increased for nearly 40% of smaller enterprises. Since more transactions are taking place outside of their native nations, the trajectory of those payments is also rising.
