Eye on Cross-Border Payments: BBVA Launches App-Based Transfers; Glance‘s License

Money transfers took a step toward app-based processing on Monday with news that BBVA is launching a service that will let persons in the United States use their smart phones to send money to recipients in Mexico. Later, the service will expand to the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America, the bank said.

BBVA expects the service, called Tuyyo (Spanish for “you and me”) to “upend the $73 billon annual market for remittances” to that part of the world from the United States, the bank said in a press release. Remittances from the U.S. to Mexico total more than $27 billion annually, according to BBVA.

In the pilot, recipients in Mexico can get their cash at some 11,000 ATMs operated by BBVA Bancomer without a bank account or an ATM card. The money is available “minutes” after being sent, BBVA says. Recipients enter a code at the machine to trigger the ATM withdrawals, though they must first make a one-time trip to a Bancomer branch to verify their identity. Recipients can also have the cash flow into a bank account or pick it up at a retail location.

First-time transfers incur foreign-exchange costs but no transaction fee. After that, BBVA will levy a flat $5.49 charge per transaction, along with foreign exchange rates.

BBVA has operated its BBVA Transfer Service in Mexico since 1995 in tandem with partner banks, the bank says. Bancomer is the largest bank in Mexico.

Based in Spain but long active in Latin America and in the Southeastern United States, BBVA earlier this year made news with a real-time money transfer using newly developed distributed-ledger technology from Ripple Labs Inc. The transaction, which took place between Mexico and Spain, was the first commercial money transfer across borders using blockchain technology, BBVA said.

In related news, Canadian mobile-payments developer Glance Technologies Inc. said has agreed to license technology to Euro Asia Pay Holdings Inc. to develop an app that can be used by persons visiting or living in North America from Asia and Europe. Vancouver, B.C.-based Glance will receive payments totaling $1 million in cash and East Asia stock for the license.

The new payments app is expected to provide an alternative particularly for Chinese tourists to Alipay and WeChat Pay, which command 90% of the mobile-payments market in China, according to a press release.