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Cryptocurrency exchange Bitex has entered into a partnership with financial software firm Bantotal to expand its cross-border payments system on the bitcoin blockchain across Latin America.
The new partnership will allow Bantotal’s clients to access Bitex’s exchange services in a traditional financial services marketplace offered by Bantotal through its BDevelopers program.
According to CoinDesk, Bitex acts as a middleman service for national and regional banks for facilitating cross-border payments, converting fiat into Bitcoin and then back to fiat. For instance, for sending payments from Argentina to Chile, customers would not need to buy the USD with Pesos. Instead, they can “just sent a payment from Argentina to Chile directly (using bitcoin).”
“With this technology, banks can have access to an API and have control of the whole process of [cross-border] payment with visibility and reliability on the bitcoin blockchain,” Manuel Beaudroit, Bitex Chief Marketing Officer, said.
Uruguay-based Bantotal is a core banking service provider with more than 60 financial organizations in 14 countries. An estimated 20 million people are reportedly using its money management services.
“We think this announcement further validates the value financial institutions are recognizing in digital assets and distributed ledger technology for executing core banking activities, like international payments. It’s also no coincidence these product partnerships are being launched in the [Latin American] market where cross-border payments, even in neighboring nations, can be slow and expensive,” Lisa Nestor, Stellar Development Foundation’s director of partnerships told CoinDesk.
In June, Visa also announced the commercial launch of the Visa B2B Connect, a distributed ledger-based, non-card payment network to help eliminate friction and time spent on cross-border corporate transactions by facilitating transactions from the bank of origin directly to the beneficiary bank.
