The Asian Banker Monday, 14 October 2024

Wise Platform expands in Asia Pacific with 9 new integrations

5 min read

Wise Platform announced its continued expansion in Asia Pacific, integrating with nine partners in the first half of 2023 and launching a new feature to help enterprises and their customers spend and manage money in multiple currencies.

Wise has spent over a decade building an entirely new cross-border payments network that makes sending, receiving, spending and managing money internationally faster and cheaper than traditional providers. Globally, more than 60 banks, fintechs and enterprises use Wise’s infrastructure for money movement. In response to growing demand and needs of partners, Wise Platform’s powerful API can now also be integrated for cross-border money spending and management capabilities — rolling out first in Australia.

By leveraging Wise Platform, enterprises will now have the ability to offer their customers faster and cheaper ways to hold, send, spend, receive and manage money internationally, directly from their existing platforms.

This will be launched first in Australia with two partners,  ProSpend and Parpera,  who will be using Wise’s infrastructure to issue multi-currency accounts and digital debit cards via their own interface to enable their customers to spend and manage money internationally with ease:

  • One card to spend in 170+ countries: issue Wise co-branded or white labelled digital debit cards (Visa or Mastercard) allowing business owners and employers to spend like a local, wherever at the mid-market exchange rate and manage expenses
  • 40+ currencies, one account: issue multi-currency accounts to hold and convert between 40+ different currencies as well as instantly generate local and global account details to receive funds in multiple currencies, allowing businesses to go global with a few clicks
  • One-stop shop: send, spend and manage money across currencies all from the convenience of one platform

In the past half year, Wise Platform launched in three new markets across Asia Pacific, powering low-cost, fast and transparent cross-border payments for millions more people and businesses in Indonesia with Bank Mandiri, Japan with GMO Aozora Net Bank Ltd and sending into India with IndusInd Bank. This comes after the launch of Wise Platform in Hong Kong with ZA Bank last November.

In addition to banks, Wise Platform deepened its footprint in the investment platforms and business services space. Interactive Brokers, moomoo, and uSMART all integrated Wise’s infrastructure to help make global investing easier, while employment platform Multiplier teamed up with Wise Platform to transform payroll management experiences for global
businesses.

In total, over 44 million people and businesses in APAC can now access fairer, more transparent financial services from the convenience of their existing providers’ platform.

Steve Naudé, head of Wise Platform, said: “For too long, the traditional international banking system has been slow, expensive and painful, affecting anyone who has ever needed to move or manage money in a different currency. Wise Platform’s expansion speaks volumes about the power of Wise’s infrastructure for banks, businesses and their customers across multiple
industries in solving this pain point.”

He added: “By leveraging Wise Platform, partners can seamlessly integrate market-leading cross-border solutions directly into their platform, which allows them to deliver better customer experiences while staying focused on their core business. At the same time, with each new integration, more people and businesses get access to faster, better and transparent international payments, bringing Wise another step towards enabling better cross-border money movement and management for everyone, everywhere.”

Sharon Nouh, CEO of ProSpend, said: “We are delighted to be partnering with Wise Platform as our fully integrated payment partner. The partnership aligns with our vision of delivering one hyper-automated spend platform. Combining our platform that helps businesses manage their business expenses, their account payables, and purchases with budget controls with Wise’s global payments technology, delivers this vision. By deeply integrating Wise's payments infrastructure into our platform, our customers can now run their entire company cards programme from the same system they use to deliver all other services. We are excited to continue to work with Wise to innovate and improve the payment and spend management process for our mutual clients.”

Henry Toh, CFO of Tiger Brokers, said: “Moving money in and out of investment portfolios using traditional payment methods can be slow and expensive when transacting in a foreign currency. Wise Platform’s seamless integration capabilities have been crucial in our continued partnership to deliver quicker and more efficient experiences for investors to trade across major global markets. The results have been remarkable, with customers loving the faster transaction speeds and reduced costs when using Wise to fund and withdraw from their Tiger trading account. Notably, since the integration, there has been a two to three times reduction in average transaction duration, which demonstrates the invaluable impact on our customers.”

Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker

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