Banking Circle Brings Its BC Payments to Australia for Cross-Border Payments

Payments company Banking Circle has launched its BC Payments unit in Australia.

The rollout, announced Monday (Aug. 28), is designed to offer FinTechs, banks and payments businesses in Australia with global payments solutions.

“Having witnessed first-hand the frustration of Australian FinTechs losing access to global payment solutions, I’m excited to now be part of the solution,” Piers Cracknell, BC Payments’ newly-appointed head of Australia, said in a news release.

“BC Payments’ offering will be delivered utilising the scale and infrastructure of the broader Banking Circle Group, which is already meeting the needs of some of the world’s largest payments businesses and banks,” Cracknell added.

According to the release, BC Payments will help Australian FinTechs struggling with global growth. Their biggest barrier: de-risking in the B2B payments space by local incumbents.

“High-growth, compliant FinTechs have been caught in the crossfire, unable to find a clearing, settlement and cross-border payments partner,” the release said.

By cutting the cost and upping the speed of non-domestic payments, local FinTechs will be able to expand their geographic reach and customer propositions, the company said.

The launch is happening at a time when small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are feeling underserved by traditional financial institutions in terms of their cross-border payments and international expansion goals.

“Most of the companies in the world are actually [SMBs],” Pegah Soltani, head of payments products at enterprise crypto solutions provider Ripple, told PYMNTS recently. “They ensure competition and drive innovation … but at the same time, they remain very underserved.”

When traditional financial players look at SMBs, the value of serving these businesses has often been overshadowed by the relative costs involved, leaving SMBs struggling to compete with larger rivals armed with access to established global payment rails and banking relationships.

But as Soltani told PYMNTS, SMBs make up more than $17 trillion of cross-border payments each year, growing much faster than other segments.

“[SMBs] really feel the pain of correspondent banking much more acutely versus larger companies,” she said. “They have a lot fewer resources. And because they’re smaller, they have worse service and worse pricing relative to the bigger competitors.”