We are glad to announce a completely new service: instant global payments for businesses and organisations. This post introduces our first B2B product iteration and explains the thinking process behind our move into the international B2B money transfer space.

From micropayments for content to global payments

Our micropayment solution for digital content addresses the growing demand for new forms of monetization in the publishing industry. Using our website widget, publishers can monetize digital content in a more user-friendly way compared to enforcing subscriptions by paywalls or subjecting readers to potentially intrusive advertisement.

While operating our content payment service, we noticed that with our solution we were solving another problem for some of our clients: handling global payouts. Our publishers love the fact that they can automatically split an incoming payment (e.g. to pay out their authors their share of earnings), regardless of whether the amounts are large or small or whether the recipient resides in the same country or on the other side of the globe. Thanks to our blockchain-based technology, these payouts happen globally within seconds and at a fraction of the costs of traditional payment methods. And what’s more: the recipient doesn’t even necessarily need a bank account to receive funds.

It’s time for innovation in payments

Although technology has allowed innovation in many industries’ processes, the cross-border payment space has largely stayed the same for the last two decades, as explained by our CEO in a recent interview with PYMNTS.com. Today still, international payments often take days and high fees are charged by different intermediaries. This is mostly because payment networks are fragmented into geographical regions (e.g SEPA in Europe, ACH in USA) and aren’t directly interoperable. Connecting international payment networks like SWIFT exist, but integration barriers, like setup fees and compliance overhead, are high. Many banks therefore don’t have a direct connection to networks like SWIFT and have to “borrow” services from banks that do; a system known as “correspondent banking”. This creates a chain of intermediaries involved in each transaction, making the process more time-consuming, costly and increasing the risk of errors.

The SatoshiPay solution

Preview: Instant payout of NGN tokens to a Nigerian bank account using SatoshiPay B2B

Using the Stellar distributed ledger network allows us to facilitate such international payments much faster, with guaranteed arrival and at a lower cost for sender as well as recipient. Stellar is a truly global payment network through which banks, financial institutions and even individuals can directly connect with one another. A cross-border payment can be sent to a local entity in the recipient country that is connecting local payment infrastructure to the Stellar network (so called “anchors” in Stellar terminology). The anchor can then transfer the equivalent amount to the recipient using the local bank network, cash outlets or other payment infrastructure.

A solution for everyone

Firstly, there are businesses and organisations that need to regularly send cross-border payments to certain countries and profit from lower fees, near-instant transactions and higher reliability and traceability. We can offer instant bank account payouts to any country with respective local anchor infrastructure. Currently, that’s predominantly countries in Latin America, the U.S. and Africa, with more countries being covered as the Stellar anchor ecosystem expands.

Our second offering in the B2B space aims at globally operating businesses, e.g. marketplaces, gaming or gig economy ventures, that are sometimes limited by the reach of today’s payment networks and can’t grow their operations to certain countries. Many of these sites therefore pay out using e-commerce vouchers or mobile phone credit instead, simply due to the lack of a better pay-out infrastructure. These companies would benefit from global token payouts via a blockchain-based payment wallet that can be used by anyone, independently of bank accounts.

Take part in the SatoshiPay B2B beta!

We are running an invite-only fee-free pilot at the moment. If you are a business and regularly make international payments contact us or visit satoshipay.io/b2b to learn more about SatoshiPay B2B.