The London-headquartered money transfer specialist is bringing its Transferwise for Banks service to Singapore with its integration with neobank Aspire, its first partner in Asia.
By integrating with Transferwise, Aspire becomes the first neobank in the country to provide international money transfers with no exchange rate markups or other hidden fees.
Transferwise for Banks enables banks, digital wallets, and other financial institutions to integrate the company's open API directly into their infrastructure, making it faster and easier for these institutions to offer seamless international transfers in over 50 currencies to their own customers.
In the partnership announcement on Tuesday, Transferwise noted that foreign currency exchange issues are one of the top three barriers Singaporean businesses face when operating internationally, and that two-thirds, including 60 percent of Singaporean SMEs, plan on prioritizing investments in technology as a way of navigating the challenges of the global pandemic.
APAC Focus
«We’re very much focused on achieving our mission to make moving money faster, easier, cheaper and more transparent for more people and businesses globally and in Asia Pacific,» said Transferwise's Venkatesh Saha, who noted that the Aspire partnership marks a «significant step» towards that goal.
«We also see a lot of interest from companies like Aspire across the region that share our mission and want to provide a best-in-class experience to their customers using TransferWise’s API for Banks,» the company's head of APAC and Middle East expansion told finews.asia.
So far this year, Transferwise has launched transfers from United Arab Emirates (UAE), partnered with Alipay, dropped prices for a number of markets including sending money to Malaysia and sending from Japan, and made it faster to send money to a number of Asian countries such as Japan and Thailand. It also plans to roll out its multi-currency account and debit card, which are already available in Australia, Singapore and New Zealand, to Japan later this year.
Growing Valuation
Launched in 2011, Transferwise has raised over $1 billion in primary and secondary transactions from investors such as D1 Capital Partners, Lead Edge, Lone Pine, Vitruvian, IVP, Merian Chrysalis , Andreessen Horowitz, Sir Richard Branson, Valar Ventures and Max Levchin from PayPal.
A $319 million secondary share sale announced this week brought the company's valuation to $5 billion – an uplift of 43 percent since May 2019.
The company has 8 million users globally and processes over £4 billion in cross-border payments every month.
