Standard Chartered and Tazapay Launch B2B Cross-Border Payments Solution

Standard Chartered and Tazapay are now facilitating B2B cross-border payments for eCommerce merchants and marketplaces.

The companies’ expanded partnership brings together Standard Chartered’s capabilities as an international banking group and Tazapay’s global payments platform, the companies said in a Monday (May 8) press release.

“Tazapay is focused on simplifying cross-border payments and together with Standard Chartered, we can now serve larger eCommerce merchants and enterprise marketplaces to collect payments instantly in over 70 markets, delivering superior customer experience and conversion rates,” Tazapay Co-founder and CEO Rahul Shinghal said in the release.

PYMNTS research has found that 48% of businesses involved in international trade said they were looking for an enhanced cross-border payment solution.

It also found that less than one-third of the businesses said that their current B2B payment solutions are satisfactory when it comes to meeting their cross-border needs, according to the “B2B Cross-Border Payments Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and American Express collaboration.

The marketplace-specific financial services offered by Standard Chartered and Tazapay allows marketplaces and merchants to accept payments from buyers in the preferred payment method and via a single application programming interface (API), according to the press release.

The extended partnership follows the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the two companies in May 2021, the pilot launch of a digital Escrow-as-a-Service (EaaS) on Singapore-based cross-border marketplace Proxtera, and successful pilot collaborations with other B2B marketplaces, the release said.

“Innovation drives a lot of what we do at Standard Chartered, and the extension of our partnership with Tazapay is another step we’ve taken in our journey towards meeting the growing needs of enterprise marketplaces,” Anurag Bajaj, global head of bank, broker dealers and FinTech client coverage at Standard Chartered, said in the release.

Small to medium-sized business (SMB) buyers and sellers are facing fewer barriers to enter the cross-border market thanks to the rise of digital marketplaces and eCommerce-as-a-Service technology solutions, but global trade is still a complicated operation, Shinghal told PYMNTS in an interview posted in December 2020.

At the heart of many of these issues is trust — or lack thereof — because sellers want to be paid in advance while buyers insist that payment should only occur upon delivery, Shinghal said at the time.

“Trust is one of the biggest challenges for SMBs while doing international trade,” Shinghal said.

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