Finastra, Visa Team on Cross-Border Payment Services

British financial software company Finastra has announced a collaboration with Visa to give businesses better access to cross-border services, a press release said Thursday (Sept. 23).

Finastra’s Payments Hub will implement Visa Direct, which gives access to billions of accounts through push to account offerings. This will give Finastra’s bank customers cross-border payouts capabilities for small and medium-sized businesses and individuals, with multiple currencies and countries available.

Finastra’s processing capability will be enabled by Visa Direct and help banks get around the complexities of building a cross-border payments solution. It will offer quick, cheap payments and transparency.

“This BaaS [banking-as-a-service] partnership will allow banks to offer their customers greater choice in how to route cross-border payments, with banks essentially embedding Visa products,” said Barry Rodrigues, executive vice president of the Payments Business Unit at Finastra. “We are excited to partner on this proposition with Visa as it provides a very attractive solution for banks seeking to help increase overall customer satisfaction and loyalty through a transparent and cost-effective digital payments option.”

Finastra also launched an alternative to buy now, pay later (BNPL) services earlier this year, PYMNTS wrote.

Read more: Finastra Launches BNPL Alternative Tool

Finastra has rolled out an embedded customer lending product which it says will make buying as frictionless as possible. It will be an alternative to BNPL, as BNPL doesn’t often apply to high-value purchases.

The platform gives merchants access to a variety of lenders and their products, and financial institutions can use it to access distributors and merchants.

“Finastra’s Embedded Consumer Lending solution offers financial institutions a direct route to growth by offering loans via a merchant’s digital point-of-sale,” said Jeannette Kescenovitz, senior director, solution management, banking-as-a-service and orchestration at Finastra. “The solution builds connectivity and relationships between financial institutions and the distributor organizations that embed lending solutions at merchants’ point-of-sale.”