Citing a Need for Faster Funding, Euronet Launches a Real-Time Cross-Border Payment Network

To help speed and simplify cross-border payments for businesses, Euronet Worldwide, a Leawood, Kansas-based fintech, on Wednesday launched Dandelion, an end-to-end real-time cross-border payment network. 

Typically, initiating a cross-border transaction is a slow and manually driven process that involves exchanging emails, phone calls, and invoices between participating parties. Further slowing the process is that five banks, on average, touch a cross-border transaction, which in turn leads to a series of middlemen in the transaction, each of which collects a fee, raising the cost of the transaction. Consumers and businesses pay more than $200 billion annually in fees to initiate cross-border transactions, according the 2020 McKinsey Global Payments Study. 

Euronet says Dandelion removes the friction in initiating a cross-border payment by using direct connections to local payment rails in 162 countries, as well as to 4 billion bank and mobile-wallet accounts, and cash delivery to more than 507,000 locations. As a result, funds can be delivered to business or consumer accounts in minutes, Euronet says.

To make it easy to connect to the Dandelion network, Euronet says it created a single, customizable application programming interface that allows businesses to natively deploy Dandelion from their payment, enterprise resource planning, or technology platform. The API is compliant with ISO 20022, a global open standard for payments messaging, to enable integration to other global systems that adhere to different standards.

In addition, Dandelion supports instant settlement of cross-border payments, thereby removing the need to establish relationships with correspondent banks and partners, Euronet says.

“No one has really focused on effectively connecting all sides of the transaction—the entire end-to-end experience—with a real-time solution. That leaves a huge gap in the payments space,” Euronet chief executive and chairman Michael J. Brown says in a prepared statement. “Most of the new entrants in the payments market focus on the interface and onboarding of end users.”

Looking ahead, Dandelion expects to have the ability to deliver real-time payments to countries representing more than 80% of  global gross domestic product by the first quarter of 2022. 

Euronet’s global payment network includes 47,474 owned and operated ATMs, 400,000 point-of-sale terminals, and a growing portfolio of outsourced debit and credit card services which are under management in 62 countries. In addition, the company has a prepaid processing network of 739,000 POS terminals at 325,000 retailer locations in 62 countries.