Visa prepares B2B Connect for commercial launch, unveils new partnerships
IBM and Bottomline Technologies are announced as new partners for the commercial launch of Visa B2B Connect.
Digital payments expert Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) continues to prepare Visa B2B Connect for commercial launch in the first quarter of 2019, and expands the list of partnerships associated with the launch.
Visa B2B Connect is a distributed ledger-based platform, which aims to provide financial institutions with a simple, fast and secure way to process cross border business-to-business payments globally. B2B Connect’s digital identity feature tokenizes an organization’s sensitive business information, such as banking details and account numbers, giving them a unique identifier that can be used to facilitate transactions on the platform.
In preparation for the commercial launch next year, Visa is expanding partnerships to add additional functionality to the B2B Connect platform.
As part of the B2B Connect platform, Visa is integrating open source Hyperledger Fabric framework from the Linux Foundation with Visa’s core assets. This will help provide an improved process to facilitate financial transactions on a scalable, permissioned network. The work between Visa and IBM will enable Visa’s mutual financial institutional clients and ecosystem to maximize the network. Building on a 40-year relationship between Visa and IBM, this is a natural progression that highlights both companies’ commitment to ensuring a frictionless cross-border payment experience with the utmost security, trust and transparency.
IBM has been active in collaborating with financial services companies in the areas of DLT application. In July this year, for instance, CLS, a market infrastructure group delivering settlement, processing, and data solutions, and IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced a collaboration on a proof of concept (PoC) for a DLT platform for the financial services industry. The platform, called LedgerConnect, aims to enable banks, buy and sell side firms, FinTechs and software vendors to deploy, share and consume services hosted on a shared distributed ledger network.
Bottomline Technologies, a leading provider of financial technology that helps make complex business payments simple, smart and secure, is working with Visa to be the first partner to integrate its solution with B2B Connect. With the integration, Bottomline’s financial institutions who participate in B2B Connect can gain easy access to the B2B Connect platform, without requiring complex technology updates.
