Mastercard Gives Hong Kong Banks X-Border Payments Help for SMBs

Mastercard began rolling out a suite of solutions designed to help banks support the cross-border payment needs of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the Asia-Pacific region.

The new Mastercard Global Commerce Suite for Small Businesses offers multicurrency support, real-time visibility and seamless integration, the company said in a Wednesday (March 11) press release.

The platform is powered by the company’s portfolio of global money movement capabilities, Mastercard Move, according to the release.

Mastercard now offers Mastercard Global Commerce Suite for Small Businesses to banks and financial institutions in Hong Kong SAR, and the company plans to expand it to select markets in the Asia-Pacific region, per the release.

The platform enables SMBs to pay and get paid confidently, connect to marketplaces and eCommerce platforms, gain better cash flow clarity with near-real-time payouts and clear tracking, and benefit from security via strong authentication and compliance functionality, the release said.

“[SMBs] want to move money across borders with the same speed and confidence as domestic transactions, but many banks remain constrained by legacy systems,” Anouska Ladds, executive vice president, commercial and new payment flows, Asia Pacific at Mastercard, said in the release. “Mastercard Global Commerce Suite for Small Businesses aims to offer banks a powerful, scalable way to support [SMB] growth by bringing payments, visibility and control together in one platform that is purpose-built for cross-border commerce.”

This is the latest of several developments around Mastercard Move.

Mastercard announced in February that it launched a collaboration with Ericsson in which the mobile communications and connectivity company will use the Mastercard Move money movement suite to help telecom service providers, banks and FinTechs expand digital wallet capabilities, introduce new payment services, and serve unbanked or underbanked communities.

In December, Mastercard teamed up with TenPay Global, Tencent’s cross-border payment platform, to enable Mastercard Move to reach over 1.4 billion users of Weixin and WeChat. The collaboration facilitates digital remittances from eligible senders around the world to Weixin Pay, a mobile payment service within the Weixin ecosystem in China.

Mastercard launched a partnership with money movement firm Thunes in November in which Mastercard Move facilitates near-real-time payouts to stablecoin wallets using Thunes’ Direct Global Network.