WorldFirst’s New Mobile Payments Platform Gets Grand Debut

We hear plenty about mobile payments on the consumer side of things, and with good reason; that’s no small market we’re talking about, after all. However, there’s a lot of market worth considering in the business payments market, and recently, WorldFirst dropped word our way about its new entry in the field. It actually debuted the new solution at the recent Money 20/20 event, and sent us a bit of a recent update about the plan.

WorldFirst’s new tool, World Account, is a multi-currency payments platform designed to make it easier for businesses to send and receive money across a fairly wide swath of geography. It works in British pounds sterling, US dollars, Japanese yen, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, New Zealand dollars, and Euros, meaning that most of the industrialized world is covered here.

About the only thing missing is Chinese yuan, and such a move might have been difficult considering the variety of laws surrounding the Chinese economy as a whole. For those countries whose currency is in the basket, though, users can open local accounts much more rapidly, and do so without fees. It also allows balances to be held in a range of currencies, potentially taking advantage of favorable exchange rates, and said balances can be quickly moved from one account to another.

Head of commercial for the Americas at WorldFirst Darren Hutchinson noted “World Account levels the playing field for smaller businesses and online sellers to conduct business overseas by providing them with the flexibility that has traditionally been given to larger, global organizations. We’re on a mission to build the world’s best platform for international trade and the launch of World Account is a key milestone on our journey.”

This is especially welcome for small business; WorldFirst’s data suggests that 98 percent of exporters and 97 percent of importers in 2016—based on reports form the International Trade Administration—were small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). That makes a multi-currency solution particularly useful for these businesses, and suggests that that may have been WorldFirst’s plan all along.

The combination of an easy way to route cash on a cross-border basis that’s likely also very mobile makes WorldFirst’s tools valuable. There will likely be plenty of businesses—small and otherwise—eager to pick up WorldFirst’s tools to send cash to other countries handily.