Here at Visa Europe Collab, we recognise the potential of blockchain technology to improve existing processes and protocols, particularly in areas that traditional payment rails have been less suitable for.

One such area is international remittances. Transferring money overseas is vital for millions of families across the world, but it can be expensive, cumbersome and slow.

We believe there’s a real opportunity to develop an improved remittance service for both the sender and receiver of payments in terms of fees, speed and ease of use. That’s why we have partnered with Epiphyte, a startup specialising in distributed ledger solutions for the mainstream financial market, to see if blockchain technology holds the key. We’re working with them on a proof of concept to run a series of simulations within a test environment and explore an alternative to conventional remittance processing.

By combining our experience as the largest payments network in the world, with Epiphyte’s knowledge of the distributed ledger, we’re hoping we can identify ways to improve the experience and better understand how these findings might be applied to remittance processes in the future. We’re now about halfway through the 100-day process and will share more news here about this exciting project in due course.