For a couple of years Visa has been engaged into an ambitious endeavor touching the cutting-edge blockchain technology. Being known as a top-notch provider of payment services can’t help but try out to revolutionize the multi-million industry of electronic funds transfers with a toolkit of decentralized distributed ledger.
As soon as such a splendid idea has crossed the mind of Visa company, the world’s payment giant started to look for a decent partnership in the blockchain-sphere, which once being found would join forces with Visa to live out an aspiring plan into digital reality.
B2B Connect Platform
Reportedly in 2016, Visa at first unfolded a blockchain-based platform for cross-border business payments called Visa B2B Connect.
Approximately at that time, the company signed a deal with Chain Inc., an alternative solution to global payments rail SWIFT that serves as a seamless rout for large payments between businesses. For as much as two years Chain Inc. has been Visa’s only business partner for the B2B Connect projects. Yet today the new partnership has seen the light of day.
The B2B Connect platform operates as a so-called supplier of “digital identity” that tokenizes highly sensitive data including account numbers and banking details with a unique identifier to facilitate faster transactions susceptible to fewer fraud. Fundamentally, cross-border corporate transactions sent through B2B Connect are processed from the bank of origin directly to the receiver at the beneficiary bank.
Speaking on the potential of B2B Connect’s digital identity feature Kevin Phalen, global head of Visa Business Solutions, said:
“B2B Connect’s digital identity greatly reduces the opportunity for fraud that might otherwise exist with checks, ACH and wire transfers today, while also helping companies remain compliant as part of the regulated financial ecosystem.”
The system largely benefits for payments in verticals such as supply chain, trade, and institutional banking, since it runs on an internal Visa network instead of the correspondent banking system.
Visa Expands Partnerships Integrating Hyperledger Fabric to B2B Connect
Visa plans to provide a commercial launchpad for B2B Connect in the first quarter of 2019 and for this occasion the company has recently partnered , thus receiving a right to use blockchain code from the Hyperledger Fabric to add additional functionality to the B2B Connect platform.
As part of the B2B Connect platform, Visa is integrating open source Hyperledger Fabric framework from the Linux Foundation with Visa’s core assets. This will help provide an improved process to facilitate financial transactions on a scalable, permissioned network.
The work between Visa and IBM will enable our mutual financial institutional clients and ecosystem to maximize the network. Building on a 40-year relationship between Visa and IBM, this is a natural progression that highlights both companies’ commitment to ensuring a frictionless cross-border payment experience with the utmost security, trust and transparency.
IBM Blockchain Services general manager Jason Kelley added:
“IBM Blockchain Platform and Hyperledger technology are delivering real business value today and B2B Connect is one of the most powerful examples to date of how blockchain is transforming payments.”
Notably that the system already have earlier adopters. As Coinspeaker previously Thailand’s fourth-largest bank Kasikornbank has signed on to test the B2B project.
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In today’s business community, partnership has become one of the most promising tools on the way to new amazing developments and interesting projects that are aimed at offering customers really unique experience and opening new opportunities for them.
News about recently established collaborations regularly appears here and there. This time the headlines are made by which is a major global digital money platform, that has conducted transactions worth over $4.0 billion across 184 countries, and Cred that is a crypto-backed lending provider with over $250 million in credit facilities.
Joint Projects
Having announced their partnership Uphold and Cred have revealed their plans to launch two cutting edge blockchain-based consumer finance products: Uphold Earn and Uphold Borrow. Both products are aimed at helping customers to earn interest from stablecoin holdings and borrow money against the cryptocurrencies they have.
Uphold Earn and Universal Dollar
With its Earn product, the company offers its customers a posibility to earn interest on Universal Dollar holdings. Earlier this month the company together with a number of other startups including Cred, Brave and Blockchain at Berkeley has announced the Universal Dollar which is a dollar-backed stablecoin.
The Universal Dollar is said to be a fully-transparent, digital asset backing 1-to-1 with U.S. dollars stored in Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured bank accounts. The customers who buy the Universal Dollar can benefit from the Uphold Earn product and earn up to 5 percent in interest, among other advantages.
Uphold Borrow Product
Uphold’s Borrow product presupposes usage of Cred’s quarter-billion-US dollar credit facility. Thanks to the new company’s product, consumers will have an possibility to borrow funds against the digital assets stored with Uphold. The sizes of loans may range from $1,000 to more than $200,000.
Now individuals as well as corporate customers do not need to seek for selling their crypto holdings when they need funds. The company enables them to receive loans in U.S. dollars collateralized by their digital assets. Moreover, a customer will have access to these loans even when a line of credit is paid off and closed.
Benefits for Customers
Explaining the idea and main aim of their new products, JP Thieriot, Co-Founder and CEO of Uphold, :
“Uphold Earn and Borrow mark the first time that we’ve seen fiat currencies, stablecoin currencies and blockchain working together to benefit a mass consumer market. Traditionally, the average consumer has been wary of digital currency for two reasons: volatility and a fear that, if they lose their key, they lose their money. Universal Dollar helps solve for both of these problems.”
The Universal Dollar will provide customers with higher levels confidence and stability just like those that the majority of people expect to get from traditional financial assets, including safety, inheritability and reduced exchange risk.
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