Airwallex Debuts Borderless Visa Card for Canadian Businesses

Airwallex has launched the Borderless Visa Card for businesses in Canada.

The virtual card, announced Wednesday (April 10), is issued by Peoples Trust Company and lets Canadian businesses make payments anywhere Visa is accepted.

“Operating across borders is table-stakes for modern businesses, whether it’s paying a supplier overseas or managing employee expenses for international travel,” Ravi Adusumilli, executive general manager for the Americas at Airwallex, said in a news release.

“With the Airwallex Borderless Visa Card, Canadian businesses gain flexibility and control to fund their card transactions in multiple currencies, making seamless, low-cost, international payments possible in a matter of seconds,” he added. 

The release noted that many business card solutions available in Canada require businesses to fund transactions in Canadian dollars, thus taking on high foreign exchange costs when spending with U.S. or international vendors.

With Visa’s virtual card capabilities, Airwallex customers in Canada can instantly generate and issue virtual cards and pay global expenses directly from their Airwallex multi-currency wallet, thus getting around unnecessary FX conversion fees.

“Over the coming months, Airwallex plans on expanding the Airwallex Borderless Card functionality, including the addition of Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the availability of physical multi-currency payment cards for business owners and their employees,” the release added.

As noted here recently, data from the Bank of England shows the value of cross-border payments reaching more than $250 trillion in the next three years. 

“But despite the size of the total addressable market, cross-border payments generally remain more expensive, opaque and slower than domestic payments — something that holds true across both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) payments,” PYMNTS wrote on Tuesday (April 9).

That’s why, the report said, it has never been a better time for innovations that can make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more accessible and more transparent — “as well as help drive interoperability across the far-flung central banks, payment system operators, providers and participants that make up the global cross-border payments ecosystem.”

PYMNTS Intelligence research from the report “Cross-Border Sales and the Challenge of Failed Payments” found that faulty cross-border payments cost U.S. merchants at least $3.8 billion in sales last year alone, with 70% of U.S. firms experiencing increased rates of failed payments in cross-border sales compared to domestic sales. 

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