Reuters have reported that the San Francisco startup Wyre Inc, a cross-border payments firm, has acquired a Beijing-based platform Remitsy. This is the first acquisition by a US company of a Chinese blockchain business in the corporate payments space.

When Remitsy is fully integrated, US-China business payments will be processed in a few hours, CEO, Dunworth said in an interview. Currently, payments are completed within three to five business days using other payments processors, he said. "We're focused on payments that are fast as email going bank to bank, and to other payments platforms.”

US-China focus

Wyre and Remitsy are primarily focused on business payments between the United States and China. Both companies are enabled by blockchain, a ledger of transactions that first emerged as the software underpinning bitcoin and is maintained by a network of computers.

Remitsy has partnerships with well-known vendors such as Alipay. The acquisition allows Wyre to incorporate those partnerships into its own platform and thus bolster its U.S.-China business, according to Dunworth. "It's the first time any Wyre customer will be able to provide pay-out in China via Alipay," he said. "Adding Alipay to our platform would be a huge benefit."

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CTMfile take: Cross-border payments don’t need to be real-time or immediate to offer significant benefits on today’s clearing cycles, but as the roll-out of the SWIFT GPI initiative and its faster, same day use of funds functionality becomes generally available. How attractive will the new Wyre US-China payments service be? Service differentiation is all going to be about how integrated the payment service is with the underlying e-commerce service not just the actual payment functionality.