The correspondent of the future: shaping international payments with bank-fintech collaborations

Roisin Levine, Head of UK & Europe Partnerships at Wise Platform, unpacks the role of bank-fintech partnerships in enhancing global payments services for customers, and how the industry can make cross-border payments as fast and efficient as sending an email.

As the cross-border payments landscape becomes more competitive, banks are pursuing new ways to enhance their international payments services to keep pace. Weighed down by complex legacy infrastructure, banks are increasingly leveraging fintech collaborations to enhance their cross-border payments at speed and scale.

Financial IT: How are you seeing bank and fintech partnerships evolve?

Roisin Levine: Many of our customers move to us from larger banks as they become aware of the faster, more convenient international payment alternatives available to them. It’s this customer expectation for speed that is driving further industry collaboration, as banks seek a fast-track to instant payments and fintechs, such as Wise, look to share their products with a wider customer base.

These collaborations between banks and fintechs work well for a number of reasons. While banks have scale, they can gain agility in non-core focus areas by working with fintechs. Banks don’t have that singular focus, they tend to focus on a sizable core product offering to serve all their customer use cases. Conversely, we can specialise in specific customer problems, such as international payments, meaning we can build high quality solutions that target specific customer pain points at speed.

For the past 13 years, we’ve been on a mission to make cross-border payments faster, transparent and low-cost. We’ve built our infrastructure, Wise Platform, with this objective, allowing banks to leverage Wise’s global payments network to offer faster and cheaper international payments to their customers with ease. We help banks enhance their international payments with our powerful API and via the SWIFT network.

Wise Platform currently works with over 85 partners worldwide, including Monzo, N26, Nubank, Ramp, Brex, and Bank Mandiri.

Financial IT: Can you give us an example of how these partnerships work in practice?

Roisin Levine: Our long-standing partnership with EQ Bank, the digital branch of Canadian Equitable Bank, is a good example of how partnerships between banks and fintechs can deliver mutual benefits. EQ Bank realised the need for a better cross-border payments experience early on and was looking for a solution to broaden its existing offering and help differentiate it from other banks.

This is where Wise Platform came into the picture. We know that allocating time and resources to international payments is not always easy and that banks don’t want to completely rebuild their infrastructure if they don’t need to. So, we offered EQ Bank a fast, safe and reliable solution.

We integrated our infrastructure into their existing network in just a matter of months, which opened up the world to their customers - giving them access to 40+ currencies across over 160 countries. Their customers can now make international payments instantly - as more than 60% of our transfers are instant - meaning they arrive in under 20 seconds. 95% of payments take less than 24 hours.*

This example also shows that Wise Platform allows banks to seamlessly integrate our scalable infrastructure to access a network with 5 direct connections into payment systems and 100+ banking partners. The value of Wise Platform is in the efficiency of our network - meaning we can move money for banks at a low cost, and at high speed without the need to completely overhaul their existing infrastructure.

Financial IT: What’s your international payments strategy and how are new technologies enabling this? How is technology changing payments?

Roisin Levine: At Wise, we believe that international payments should be instant, convenient, and low-cost. We use different methods and technologies that enable us to be quicker and better at what we do. We leverage domestic payment rails to make over 60% of global payments sent via Wise arrive instantly - within 20 seconds.*

In terms of technology, there are an infinite number of possibilities and applications. As a business, we prioritise where we can create efficiencies and lower fees when making international payments for our customers and partners. And we have been delivering on our mission to reduce the cost and increase the speed of carrying out global transactions - an accomplishment that banks have yet to match.

Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) play a crucial role in the industry’s ability to scale efficiently and tackle fraudalong with other forms of financial crime. Manual intervention is costly and time-consuming, with AI and ML providing significant cost savings and efficiencies for banks and fintechs alike. For example, AI and ML have enabled us to better detect fraudulent activity, and contributed to a 50% reduction in the amount of money Wise’s UK customers lost to scams last year.

What truly piques our interest is the maturity and evolution of global payments infrastructure. Regional infrastructure initiatives play a significant role in the future of global payments. It’s these kinds of developments that excite us because they align with our mission to move money faster and at a reduced cost.

Financial IT: What technologies will we be talking about in the next 5 years?

Roisin Levine: I believe the industry will make further advancements by embedding payments in more places to solve the specific use cases and needs of customers.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are a good way to make payments instant, but they require a considerable amount of resources to build. This could act as a barrier to wider adoption and scalability.

The domestic payment rails we have today are built to scale and are continuously gaining speed, increasing the number of instant, cheaper payments. We believe that in the near-future our customers will expect international payments to move with the same efficiency as domestic payments and at the same speed as sending an email.

Find out more about Wise Platform’s Correspondent Services solution: https://platform.wise.com/correspondent-services

*Transaction speed claimed depends on individual circumstances and may not be available for all transactions.