With the Fintech Festival underway this week in Singapore, there is no better time and place to unveil some exciting updates on Visa’s efforts to transform the business-to-business (B2B) payments space.

Late last year, we previewed Visa B2B Connect, a platform designed to give financial institutions a secure, fast and predictable way to process corporate cross-border B2B payments. Since then, we have been hard at work, partnering with financial institutions around the world to transform this vision into a platform that is now processing bank-to-bank test transactions ahead of a planned commercial launch in mid-2018.

Today, we are excited to announce our work with innovators from Commerce Bank in the United States, Shinhan Bank in South Korea, Union Bank of Philippines and United Overseas Bank in Singapore. We are beginning to process bank to-bank test transactions with a few of these partners, with others to follow soon, as we gear up for the commercial launch of Visa B2B Connect.

Visa has been a leading provider of commercial card payment solutions and continues to see expanding opportunities in high-value cross-border payments—an area that’s ripe for improvement and innovation. Today, making cross-border corporate payments can be a cumbersome, lengthy and friction-filled process for financial institutions and their corporate clients. Using technology based on blockchain architecture, Visa B2B Connect simplifies this process by sending transactions over Visa’s network from the bank of origin directly to the recipient bank.

Chris Wiedenmann, VP, commercial payments and products at Commerce Bank said, “In a world of increasing global interconnectedness, the ability to make and receive payments quickly and transparently is critical for companies of all sizes. Commerce Bank is dedicated to delivering new and innovative solutions for our customers and, through our powerful relationship with Visa, we are excited to be participating in the Visa B2B Connect pilot.”

As we bring our product one step closer to commercial availability, we are keeping a few guiding principles top of mind:

Security, interoperability and governance Visa is known for

Creativity, agility and product flexibility are vital attributes as we develop the products and capabilities that will power the next generation of payments. But innovation cannot come at the expense of security, interoperability and governance – key cornerstones of our business that have made Visa a leader in global payments. That is why we have been very intentional and thorough in the product design phase, ensuring that Visa’s data security standards are incorporated into every layer.

Think like a developer

Open APIs allow developers to take our capabilities and to build solutions that can quickly scale in multiple markets. That’s why we designed B2B Connect with an “API-first” strategy. With B2B Connect APIs exposed in the Visa Developer Platform, B2B Connect is designed to harness the power of the global developer community to enable a smarter cross-border B2B payments flow.

We’re excited to share these developments in Singapore, a country where a transformation in B2B payments could have a tremendous impact. As home to the second busiest port in the world, Singapore is a major hub for cross border shipping—an industry that can benefit greatly from enhanced and more predictable cross-border B2B payments.

We look forward to connecting with industry thought leaders at the Fintech Festival and to share more on the exciting developments with Visa’s B2B Connect platform. If you would like to learn more about Visa B2B Connect, please contact the team at [email protected].