This piece is found in Finextra and reviews a new offering from Rapyd, the London, UK-based fintech that provides platform services to fintechs. In this case, the firm is announcing the move into cross-border commerce via the use of virtual accounts. We had written a member research piece last year on the rise of virtual accounts as a treasury management tool, supporting the use of POBO/ROBO models for internal banks and simplifying payments reconciliation across multiple business units. So, Rapyd is offering this concept as a way to improve the management of payouts across various international markets without the burden of managing a local physical bank account. The virtual account trend has been most prevalent in Europe but is spreading into other markets now.
‘Rapyd… today announced the launch of Virtual Accounts, a vital product empowering businesses to expand globally while supporting local payments. This new offering allows organizations anywhere in the world to securely and reliably accept local bank transfers across over 40 countries in more than 25 currencies, including the US, UK, EU, and APAC regions…
The launch of Virtual Accounts comes at a crucial time for businesses searching for payment support to allow them to tap into the global marketplace. While 93 percent of businesses report cross-border commerce is a high priority for their organizations in 2022, nearly 1 in 4 say supporting local payment methods is their biggest operational challenge holding them back1.’
The posting goes on to discuss several Rapyd partners and business use cases (including e-commerce payments acceptance and BNPL) as ways to utilize the virtual account concept, supported by several features of the firm’s platform. So as the PaaS/BaaS trend continues to expand globally, the addition of virtual accounts as a tool just follows that logical progression of digital platform services now at the disposal of fintechs.
‘Virtual Accounts can be set up to match the needs of businesses as they grow, with as many Virtual Accounts as required to collect and organize funds across countries, currencies, and customer needs. Using Rapyd’s single API, Virtual Accounts can be used with Rapyd Collect, Rapyd Disburse and Rapyd Wallet to empower local and cross-border payment acceptance and distribution…
Businesses can have as many Virtual Accounts as needed and allocate them by country, currency or customer, but still only use a single Rapyd Wallet.’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group