Multi-Currency Digital Wallet Solution to Facilitate B2B X-Border Payments in Emerging Markets

Cross-border payments remain a challenge for businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), looking to make payments in less familiar currencies belonging to emerging markets like Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Since 2019, business-to-business (B2B) payments platform and currency exchange marketplace Verto has been working to solve that logistical challenge for firms, helping them make payments across multiple currencies while minimizing foreign exchange (FX) volatility.

To further its mission, the London-based currency exchange marketplace announced on Tuesday (Feb. 8) that it had partnered with payments specialist Acquired to deliver a multi-currency digital wallet solution to its customers.

Read more: B2B Marketplace VertoFX: From Currency Convertibility to Cross-Border Payments in Emerging Markets

Through the deal, Verto’s clients will have access to a “combined ecommerce top-up and pay-by-link solution” that will enable them to collect payments in different currencies and top-up their digital wallets and multi-currency accounts through card payments.

And because suppliers will be able to manage their payments more efficiently, the solution will reduce their time-to-market and prevent losses in profitability, the firm said.

Read also: Verto, Banking Circle Partner on International Payments

Verto VP of Product and Analytics Irakli Menabde said eCommerce is a fast-growing industry, especially in emerging markets, and that the B2B firm was “delighted to take the first step into another vertical” in the payments space. And because choosing a partner that had multi-acquirer connectivity “was a must,” Menabde said Acquired was an obvious choice for the firm.

Focused on illiquid currencies, Verto recently released its enterprise application programming interface (API) product, which according to Verto CEO Ola Oyetayo, would give businesses and FinTechs in corridors such as Africa — “one of the most expensive corridors to send money in the world” — access to the infrastructure and banking relationships that Verto has built over time.

In an interview with PYMNTS last December, Oyetayo said, “What we want to do is to enable tech savvy businesses to integrate with us via an API and then we [can] power their cross-border payments needs,” a process that will be made easier by Verto’s regulatory license from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Oyetayo went on to say that in an ideal world, they’ll be looking to create a closed ecosystem where wallet-to-wallet transfers can take place between businesses using the Verto platform.

Read Oyetayo’s interview: Currency Exchange Marketplaces Accelerate Supplier Payments for Emerging Markets SMBs

That means a U.K. company that wants to pay a supplier in Kenya, for example, can directly transfer the funds from their KES wallet to the supplier’s KES wallet, eliminating the multitude of intermediaries involved in the correspondent banking network.

“Our view is that at some stage we’ll have a world where every business is on Verto for specific corridors and they’re using our wallets to send and receive money [instantly],” he said.

See also: The B2B Marketplace Fix for FX in Emerging Markets

Today, the B2B cross-border foreign exchange (FX) and payments enabler facilitates payments for banks and businesses across multiple foreign currencies and has onboarded about 2,000 businesses from about 25 countries worldwide since inception.

In addition to its Corporate Card product that will be launched sometime this year, the firm is also working on a liquidity proposition for smaller players who can’t pay out instantly due to a lack of float in the currency that they’re delivering into.

“You could almost call it a buy now, pay later product [through which] Verto provides liquidity in [various] currencies to these smaller remittance players, allowing them to compete with larger firms that maybe have a credit line with a local bank,” Oyetayo said.