Earthport has signed a membership agreement to partner on the Eurogiro infrastructure, extending services to Eurogiro members for international low value clearing to the 60 countries where Earthport facilitates local payments, and enabling Earthport to connect to Eurogiro members’ extensive client base.

Eurogiro provides connectivity and payment services, mostly within account to account transfers and cash payments, to its membership community of financial institutions. Earthport brings to the community its efficient, transparent, secure, and multi-currency international payments service.

Eurogiro 

Eurogiro was founded by a group of European postal organisations focused on improving cross-border payments for their customers. It operates a low value – high volume payments system based on Straight Through Processing (STP), transparency and secure cost-efficiency in all parts of the payment chain. Its reach is now global with 500,000 member branches and post offices in 50+ countries. The network includes partnerships with a variety of payment systems and a range of payment methods. 

Michel Stuijt, CEO at Eurogiro, commented: “Having Earthport join as a member is a very valuable addition to the Eurogiro community. Earthport’s business model cuts cost and adds efficiency to traditional correspondent banking methods by tapping direct into the national clearing systems for account transfers. The connection to Earthport provides, especially for our postal members, a great opportunity to expand out-bound as well as in-bound business.”

Eurogiro has four partners: Western Union since 1984, Deutsche Postbank, and SWIFT where Eurogiro acts as the administrator of a Closed User Group (CUG) for payment transactions on SWIFTNet. (The CUG allows members to exchange FileAct, Interact or Browse transactions between themselves or to transmit transactions to non-SWIFT members of Eurogiro via the Eurogiro hub.) And now Earthport which will add reach into additional markets and account types.

Earthport 

Paul Thomas, Executive Director at Earthport said: “We are proud to join Eurogiro and excited to be able to add value to corporate and consumer clients of the membership community. Over the next few months we will be working with Eurogiro to integrate our networks and promote our transparent international payments service to members. As well as providing Eurogiro members the benefits of low value clearing, Earthport also plans to provide value to its own financial institution clients by extending its clearing network to postal accounts through Eurogiro member agreements.”

Earthport provides a robust, electronic white-label service for banks and other payments service providers to make cross-border payments that benefit from greater transparency. Across six continents Earthport reaches over 60 countries directly through local clearing capabilities with many more in the pipeline and a further 140 through traditional methods.

Also see: impact of virtual account services, Earthport items - 1, 2 and competitor services.

---

CTMfile take: The combined coverage of Eurogiro and Earthport networks probably exceeds anything else. This could be the network to solve the distribution of low value payments world-wide.