Global payment giant, Visa has launched its long-awaited businesses to business payment service. The service was initially announced in October 2016. Now that it’s live, Visa hopes to speed up the cross border payments for its corporate clients at a lower operational cost.

According to a report published earlier today by Reuters, the Visa B2B Connect network will cover 30 corridors globally and it’s expected to expand to over 90 markets by the end of the year. The system will work on simplifying international payments by enabling transactions by businesses to happen directly from their bank to the beneficiary bank.

This will offer an alternative to the correspondent banking network where an intermediary bank is often used by smaller banks to make payments, consequently resulting in slower transactions and added complexity.

The payment network launch is part of Visa’s push to expand its reach beyond credit card payments where the company is one of the dominant players around the globe.

In a statement, Kevin Phalen, who is the SVP, global head of Visa Business Solutions noted:

“By creating a solution that facilitates direct, bank to bank transactions, we are eliminating friction associated with key industry pain points.”

According to Visa, the network has elements of the distributed ledger technology, the software that initially emerged as the system powering virtual currencies.

Phalen added that the network is not entirely based on the blockchain; however, there are some aspects of the distributed ledger since that allows for more payment information than traditional systems.

Visa’s B2B Connect network was initially developed alongside Chain, a blockchain startup that builds blockchains to support financial systems. However, Visa ultimately opted to use Hyperledger Fabric for the distributed ledger technology side of the system with assistance from IBM.

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