Cross-border payment war is coming soon–Visa’s got a crush on Earthport

The takeover of two UK cross-border payments, from ant financial and Visa, is currently under negotiation. if all two acquisitions are successful, there will be a battle between Ant Financial and Visa in the UK’s cross-border payment market in the future.

After Ant Financial was exposed to a £550 million acquisition of WorldFirst, US payment giant Visa was also exposed to the acquisition of British cross-border payment company Earthport.




Visa will pay $250.6 million for Earthport, a British cross-border payments company, Reuters reported.

Public information shows that VISA is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Foster City, California, United States It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, gift cards, and debit cards.

Earthport, founded in 1997, is a UK provider of cross-border payment solutions that provides customers with access to global bank payment networks and simplifies cross-border payment processes for businesses.Earthport’s main customers include bank of America, Hyperwallet, Transferwise and Payoneer.

Earthport employs more than 200 people and is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Miami, dubai and Singapore. Its payment network spans Banks in 87 countries and its customers include bank of America, Hyperwallet, Transferwise and Payoneer. Earthport partnered with Ripple in 2015 to provide real-time payment services to its banking partners using distributed ledger technology.



Earthport shares have been under pressure this year, falling more than 28 percent as losses and costs have grown, Reuters reported. Earthport said last month that “fundamental” changes to its strategy were needed.

In 2016, Earthport launched an application programming interface (API) to integrate Banks and rabo’s distributed ledger protocol when processing cross-border payments, Finextra reported. The progress will allow Banks to overcome budgetary, technical and compliance constraints.

In fact, it was the second consecutive week in a row that two UK cross-border payment companies had revealed they would be taken over.




Earlier, paypay.me reported on December 24 that Ant Financial was in talks with WorldFirst, a UK cross-border payments company, to buy WorldFirst for $700m. For details, please see: China’s Ant Financial intends to buy UK payment company WorldFirst for $700 million

As is known to all, as one of the indispensable infrastructure of financial business, payment can obtain capital precipitation and user data in the process of carrying out business, which is conducive to combining the enterprise’s own business model with finance to form a business closed loop.

At the same time, in the case of irreversible development trend of financial science and technology, mastering payment means mastering data, and mastering data also forms core competitiveness. It can be said that whoever masters payment data is likely to have an advantageous position in the future competitive brand.

In recent years, alipay has been taking payment as the core power point for layout.

It is worth noting that payment systems and financial information security have recently received attention from some countries. In January of this year, Ant Financial’s acquisition of US MoneyGram failed. In the joint statement issued by the two parties, it was shown that the acquisition had to be suspended due to the lack of approval from the US Foreign Investment Committee.

Currently, both ant financial and Visa are in the stage of negotiation for the acquisition of the two cross-border payments in the UK. If these two acquisitions can be successfully concluded, ant financial and Visa will have a battle in the cross-border payment market in the UK in the future.