Visa Launches New Blockchain Project to Compete with SWIFT

Visa has announced that it is entering a $125 trillion market using blockchain to carry out these particular payments in the fastest, most economical and most transparent way ever. The blockchain and cryptocurrency industry is among the most lucrative businesses in the world, and this is the reason why popular companies, institutions or people with a big impact on the world’s economy are not hesitating to take advantage of any opportunity available.

Now, Visa appears to be doing this on a large scale. For instance, in 2018, it moved around $11.2 trillion from its financial payment rails in over 220 countries for acquisitions including payments from vehicles, online shopping, cups of coffee, etc., and it is now seeking to have a larger market for international transactions, business-to-business (B2B) transactions, for financial institutions to easily transfer funds in the best interests of corporate clients.

A lot of the international payments are normally conducted via the SWIFT, Belgian financial group that commenced around four decades ago and has over 11,000 monetary organizations as business partners. Swift rolled out gpi back in 2017, in order to increase the transparency and the speed of the transactions.  

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The fact that it has more business members is not enough and does not save Visa from the bad reactions it has been receiving from its clients and the public at large. One of the complaints has been rotating on its system inefficiencies, such as the speed and time it takes the transaction to be completed, the transparency and security of the transaction and others. It has been very hard to effectively track the progress of the money transfer in the pipeline and also the cost estimate of the transfer has been so uncertain, since the foreign exchange rates for countries are totally different.  

Visa has been looking into innovations for a while now. Last year they partnered with IBM to launch a payment system using Ethereum blockchain. The system tokenizes private data like important information about, account numbers, etc., and also makes his/her identifiers used by businesses in cross-border payments especially on various exchange platforms.

However, according to the global head of business solutions at Visa Kevin Phalen, the company is now trying to develop a blockchain-based system so-called B2B Connect product, that will make transactions very convenient, faster, secure and transparent. The software enables direct bank links, and also allows participants to openly check payment fees. It is expected that this platform will bring the transactions to be completed within a maximum of 24 hours.