Spanish financial services giant Banco Santander (“Santander”) is reportedly planning to expand its “One Pay FX” service to include support for money transfers from Latin America to the U.S.
As CryptoGlobe reported back in April 2018, this service is powered by Ripple’s xCurrent, “Ripple’s enterprise software solution that enables banks to instantly settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking.”
The purpose of this mobile app (currently only available for iOS) to allow Santander customers who have a debit card to complete near-instant international payments across multiple payment corridors.
On July 11, Santander added support for the UK-Poland payments corridor, which meant that UK-based customers could send Zloty (PLN) payments to Poland.
At the present time, only UK-based and Spain-based customers of Santander could send funds to the U.S. using the “One Pay FX” app.
Santander’s head of “One Pay FX”, Cedric Menager told Coindesk about the popularity of this service:
Customers who were not doing international transfers are now using the service, customers who were using international transfer are now doing it more, and customers who had gone to use fintech competition have come back because of the One Pay offering.
He went to explain the significance of introducing service in Latin America:
The international payment experience in the Latin American markets is even less evolved than in the European markets. There are even parts of the Latin American market where it’s almost impossible to do an online international payment.
Santander’s xCurrent-powered global remittance service, unlike SWIFT, offer near-instant settlement either for free or at a very low cost (comparable to TransferWise).
Menager also explained that this new payment corridor will be “launched country-by-country.”
And finally, he mentioned that Santander plans to offer the “One Pay FX” service to U.S. customers at some further point in the future.
What this means is that, initially, due to the tougher financial regulations in the U.S., there will only a one-way flow of funds along the Latin America to the U.S. payment corridor (i.e. Santander’s customers in supported Latin American countries will be able to use the service to send money to the U.S. but not vice versa).
As Santander announced back on 3 April 2019, at Santander’s 2019 Investor Day event, the company is also planning to offer “a new open-market international payments service called Pago FX.” This service will let anyone, not just Santander customers, tp make international payments. In the near future, this service will be launched in Poland, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Featured Image Courtesy of Ripple
