Bank BBVA, has announced the launch of its payments and financial services on Trusple, a blockchain platform for global trade that is owned by Ant Financial. Of late, there has been a lot of attention on payments and financial services being offered to businesses as firms realize that this sector is likely to see some good growth in the coming months.
Over the last couple of years, all the attention had been on the retail payments and services sector and that industry has seen some massive growth with many startups and established players coming up with a lot of innovations to serve this space. As this space begins to get crowded, the financial firms have started to pay attention to businesses and companies and the cross-border payments that these companies have to make regularly.
“Trusple is designed to resolve the problems that SMEs [small-and-medium-sized enterprises] and financial institutions face when in cross-border trade. BBVA’s previous research on blockchain technology will allow us to incorporate new services in this platform fairly easily,” said Alejandro Cardenas Bortoni, head of Commercial Banking at BBVA México.
The idea of this partnership is to provide integrated financial services for the companies so that they can use this platform for all their payment needs, especially with cross-border payments which have always been a challenge with legacy systems. With a blockchain platform in place, they would hope that the transparency and security would be multiplied several times over and this would be an added attraction for businesses as they deal with large fund sizes every month.
The service is expected to launch first in Mexico and Spain and once this pilot grows well and stabilizes it is expected that this service would be offered to companies in other regions as well. Digitalization of this space is very important for the platforms and the businesses to keep pace with the growth of this space and also of the other participants. So, it does make sense for the companies to partner together to quicken the process of digitalization especially when the retail space is growing by leaps and bounds during this period. The launch of this partnership on the platform is expected to happen in 2022 and it will be closely watched to see the uptake from the various companies in Spain and Mexico for such a service.
