Visa Europe Collab, Visa Europe’s innovation hub, teamed up with Epiphyte to work on the new proof of concept for blockchain-based international remittance services.
Visa Europe’s innovation center, Visa Europe Collab, has announced a partnership with Californian blockchain solutions provider Epiphyte to develop the proof of concept for cross-border remittances. The new project is aimed at making remittance services easier and more effective with the use of bitcoin and blockchain technology.
The proof of concept will also run through a number of simulations in a created test environment which uses digital currency as an alternative to traditional remittance processing system.
“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,” the company said in a blog post.
Visa Europe Collab expects the use of the technology and bitcoin will help to improve the payment services sector, making it faster and easier. Each day millions of people all over the world send money across borders, but the process can be slow, challenging and too expensive.
“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,” said Jon Downing, Visa Europe Collab innovation partner.
Visa Europe Collab believes that combining its knowledge with Epyphyte’s experience will help them to find alternative solutions to conventional remittance processing in the next years.
“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,” the company stated.
The proof of concept is already under development and is predicted to be finished in the next 2 months.
Founded in 2013, Epiphyte now serves the financial industry players providing distributed ledger solutions for international money transfers. Last month, the company graduated from the 6th batch of startups accelerated by Boost VC, a known incubator in the bitcoin community, focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency startups.
With offices in Berlin, London and Tel Aviv, Visa Europe Collab brings together its world partners to generate new innovative ideas for payment industry and develop them into reality.
Visa has recently acquired Visa Europe, a membership association that manages Visa ventures in Europe, for $24 billion, with the deal is set to close in the Q3 of 2016. Visa Europe was part of Visa until 2007, when it became a separate entity.
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