Goldman inks Visa deal for corporate payments push

New York

GOLDMAN Sachs Group has inked a partnership with Visa as it builds out its newly formed transaction-banking arm.

The bank is using Visa capabilities that allow Goldman's corporate clients to easily send and track high-value payments to other businesses overseas, according to a statement on Monday. Goldman agreed to the deal after talking with more than 100 clients.

"That's one area where we heard the most dissatisfaction: sending a payment cross border," Eduardo Vergara, global head of transaction banking product and sales at Goldman Sachs, said. "It's much more painful than making a payment domestically."

Goldman's latest offering capitalises on the fact that businesses have increasingly diversified their supply chains and sought to buy and sell goods overseas. That has caused the value of their cross-border payments to soar to more than US$30 trillion a year, according to the consultancy Juniper Research.

Goldman will also use Visa's direct-payouts capabilities to allow its corporate clients to send smaller, higher-volume payments to their end customers across borders, the two firms said in the statement.

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"From Goldman's standpoint, it significantly simplifies the process," Vasant Prabhu, Visa's chief financial officer, said. "We are doing this to take the friction out of business-to-business cross-border payments." BLOOMBERG