OwlTing Turns to Visa Direct to Power Cross-Border Payments

Blockchain FinTech OwlTing says it will begin employing Visa Direct to power real-time, cross-border payments.

The agreement lets OwlTing potentially reach more than 8.5 billion endpoints in Visa’s payment global network, the Taipei-based company said in a Tuesday (Oct. 1) news release.

“With Visa Direct, OwlTing can allow its U.S. customers to transfer money seamlessly across regions through OwlPay, its Web2 and Web3 hybrid payment solution in two phases of integration of the Company’s payment services with Visa Direct solutions,” OwlTing said, adding that it hopes to complete its integration with Visa Direct Account and Visa Direct Card solutions by the end of the year and by the end of the first quarter of 2025, respectively.

“Corporate users that need to pay their business partners overseas or individual users such as parents who want to transfer funds to their children studying abroad can leverage OwlPay as a fast, secure, and cost-effective solution to make instant money transfer transactions,” the release added.

PYMNTS examined the use of blockchain to improve cross-border payments last week in a conversation with Sheraz Shere, GM payments and commerce at Solana Foundation

“Traditional cross-border payments still have a lot of issues with transparency and cost. To get the experience to a 10, it should be — at least from a user experience (UX) perspective — like using Venmo: you find the recipient, you pick a currency to send to them, and they instantly have those funds,” Shere, told PYMNTS. “That’s the north star for consumer use cases.”

But today’s cross-border reality is “anything but a 10,” that report added.

On the consumer side, Shere rated available options at a “two or three,” arguing that navigating the complexities of these transactions — such as high fees and long settlement times, along with the convoluted networks of correspondent banks — has remained a major challenge.

This is where blockchain and stablecoin solutions — and not just than the broader and often controversial term “crypto” — can play an important role.

“Blockchain solutions and stablecoins, I don’t like to use the term crypto because this is more about FinTech, they’ve found product-market-fit in cross-border payments,” Shere said.

He added that one of the key advantages of blockchain technology is disintermediation — doing away with the need for the multiple hops through correspondent banks, which tend to slow down and increase the cost of transactions.