Morgan Stanley Taps Wise Platform to Accelerate Cross-Border Settlements

Morgan Stanley will offer its clients high-speed cross-border settlements through Wise Platform.

The investment bank tapped this solution from Wise, a global technology focused on money movement, to facilitate foreign exchange international settlement for its corporate and institutional clients, the companies said in a Tuesday (Dec. 17) press release.

“Our relationship with Wise enables us to adapt to the evolving needs of our clients and deliver one of the fastest, operationally robust and cost-effective payment capabilities in the banking industry,” Samer Oweida, global head of foreign exchange and emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, said in the release.

Wise Platform can be embedded into the existing infrastructure of banks, financial institutionsand large companies, enabling them to send, receive and manage money internationally, according to the release.

Wise has more than 65 licenses and six direct connections to payment systems, enabling 63% of its cross-border payments to be completed in under 20 seconds, per the release.

“Morgan Stanley has a strong and clear payments vision for the experiences and solutions they want to offer their customers, and we’re thrilled to be working with them to enable their corporate payment capabilities and bring fast, cost-effective, transparent and easy payments to Morgan Stanley’s clients,” Steve Naudé, managing director, Wise Platform, said in the release.

Wise said in June that it was upping its investment in payment infrastructure to meet the needs of its growing customer base and to allow it to cut fees by making the processing of cross-border payments more efficient.

At the time, the company reported 29% growth in the number of customers and a 31% increase in underlying income over the previous year.

“We are investing in infrastructure and customer experiences to serve as much of this huge, underserved cross-border payments market as possible, including starting FY25 by reducing fees further for our customers,” Wise Co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann said June 13 during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

In April, European embedded finance firm Swan integrated Wise Platform to enable its clients to send and receive money from more than 190 countries. With Wise Platform fully integrated into Swan’s technology stack, Swan’s clients can implement the solution faster and at less cost and enable seamless international payments.

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