The Global Payments Facility Driving Digital Transformation Today

The revolution in banking services that’s affected financial institutions worldwide has had a significantly positive impact on businesses and the way they move money around.

A few years ago, a “bank” was usually an older financial institution with large overheads from physical premises and significant commitments to entrenched services such as merchant banking, investment banking, insurance underwriting, stock trading, and many more. In combination with legacy digital infrastructure, “traditional” financial institutions were slow to adapt to the demands of a new generation of customers for digital-first, agile services.

Indicative of the continuing revolution in the financial sector is Open Banking a way around many of the issues of a legacy-heavy banking sector and indicative of the future. In combination with changes to governmental regulation and open banking, existing financial institutions and a new generation of fintech companies like so-called neobanks now have access to a choice of scalable, secure, and modular services like those from new providers of payment platforms.

Many institutions in the financial sector are blurring the lines between traditional demarcations: neobanks’ offerings often reach further than previous generations’ portfolios, and digital-first finance houses offer white-label services to retailers and brands not associated with the sector a generation ago. Underpinning most financial platforms now is a series of secure and reliable APIs that enable frameworks like open banking. Companies wishing to leverage services – for instance, international, foreign exchange monetary transfers – simply sign up for services and access them using open standards designed to process payments at scale, quickly, securely, and instantly.

In the case of retailers and service providers that trade internationally, incumbent arrangements with traditional banks often limit the strategic possibilities open to the company. Instead of being able to test the water in a new market or pilot sales into new territory, companies can find limited choices in available currencies or discover that the exchange rates offered are unfavorable or come with unrealistic per-transaction fees.

That limits companies’ abilities to exploit market niches or explore new possibilities quickly and securely. In many cases, by the time the opportunity has presented itself, a faster-moving competitor may already be in place.

Conversely, a digital-native international payment processor such as Buckzy Payments Inc. offers a fully global real-time payment scheme for both outgoing and incoming international monies, making overseas commerce as painless to set in motion as establishing a domestic payment system. Critically, it’s fast to set up, and for development teams, a relatively simple task to place into, for instance, an e-commerce payments stack or marketplace.

With a pre-built payments network and relationships with established institutions worldwide, customers get access to over 25 digital wallets, seamless exchange into and from global currencies, and can transact business efficiently wherever their strategy takes them. Companies’ digital transformations are no longer limited by last-generation banking institutions’ slower, less advanced practices. The digital-native nature of payments companies allows businesses to pivot quickly and scale into new markets, with seamless integration between their own IT stack and that of the digital payment platform.

Companies operating in the Open Banking framework can offer a range of different financial services to their clients, each of which is accessed in, effectively, the same way – API calls. Companies can sign up for and receive access to international currency interchange and then also use Buckzy’s account verification services if required in the future, for example, without any significant retooling.

We’ll be looking at some of these additional available services in future articles, services that, thanks to ISO 20022, are opening out a broader range of digitally-powered financial processes between institutions.

As the definitions between banking and financial platforms blur, companies using technology to drive change into their target markets should partner with companies with the same mindset. Of the payments enabling solutions that we at Tech Wire Asia have come across, few have the international reach, credibility, and scope of Buckzy Payments Inc. From foreign exchange services right up to fully white-labeled banking-as-a-service, the company’s customers can quickly and securely leverage what they need when they need it.

To learn more about what’s available, check back here in a few weeks. Or, if what you’ve read has inspired you to find out more, reach out to a local representative near you today.

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