Goldman Sachs works with Visa to speed cross-border B2B payments

Goldman Sachs will use Visa business payment products to improve clients' cash flow, a challenge for many organizations during the pandemic and in the early stages of recovery.

The bank will implement Visa B2B Connect and Visa Direct Payouts for supply-chain finance and business-to-consumer disbursements with parties in different countries. The card brand's products are designed to support real-time visibility into payment status and to manage data for reconciliation and compliance.

B2B Connect uses a distributed ledger to shorten transaction processing from several weeks to one or two days. Distributed ledgers such as blockchains have proven useful as a way to eliminate time-consuming and fee-extracting steps from international payments, such as the use of correspondent banks or other third parties to manage currency conversions or handle local compliance.

Visa has expanded B2B Connect's capabilities via partnerships with FIS, a financial technology provider, and Behalf, an Isreali technology company that automates purchases for small businesses that buy from e-commerce companies.

Visa Direct Payouts allows businesses to use an application programming interface to support peer-to-peer transactions and payouts such as insurance claims and remittances.

Goldman Sachs will immediately make the two Visa products available to its transaction banking clients through existing connections to the bank.

Visa Direct Payouts connects to more than 90 markets, which Goldman Sachs hopes will expand payout options for smaller businesses and payments between businesses and consumers.

Goldman Sachs' earlier moves to automate cross-border B2B payments include a partnership with SAP to pair the bank's cross-border payments rail with Ariba, SAP's B2B payments marketplace.

B2B has been one of the last payment types to embrace automation on a large scale, with many businesses still reliant on checks. The pandemic interrupted supply chains and increased liquidity risks, a challenge that has been particularly acute for small businesses.