ACE Money Transfer and Visa expand work on card-funded remittances

ACE Money Transfer has announced a collaboration with Visa to support account funding transactions, extending the remittance company’s use of Visa’s payments capabilities for card-funded international transfers. ACE said the arrangement is intended to improve speed, security and reliability for customers sending money across borders.

The companies will focus on promoting Account Funding Transactions, or AFTs, which ACE described as part of the infrastructure behind card-funded transfers on its platform. In practice, the initiative relates to how customers fund a money transfer before ACE processes the remittance to family or friends overseas.

ACE Money Transfer said the work with Visa forms part of its investment in global payments infrastructure. The company positioned the collaboration as a way to strengthen its transfer funding process while using Visa’s payments network to support digital payment experiences for international remittance users.

Rehan Ashraf, head of payments and banking infrastructure at ACE Money Transfer, said Visa’s AFT capability supports the systems behind card-funded transfers made through the company. “This is about building a payments stack that performs for our customers, and for the corridors we serve,” Ashraf said.

Ashraf added that the Visa collaboration was “an important step” in improving ACE’s payment capabilities. He said the work on AFTs would enhance how customers fund transfers while ACE continues to invest in secure, reliable and efficient payment services.

Visa framed the partnership in the context of growing demand for digital cross-border payments. Olga Ovchinnikova, vice-president and head of Visa Direct Europe, said collaboration across the payments sector has become more significant as more consumers use digital channels to move money internationally.

“By expanding our work with ACE Money Transfer across Visa Direct capabilities, we're helping enable secure, seamless and reliable money movement for customers around the world,” Ovchinnikova said. She added that the companies aim to make it easier for ACE customers to fund and send transfers efficiently.

The announcement did not disclose financial terms, implementation timelines, transaction volumes or specific remittance corridors covered by the collaboration. ACE and Visa also did not provide customer pricing details or projected adoption figures.

For remittance providers, the funding stage is a central operational point because it determines how quickly a transfer can begin and how reliably the payment can be authenticated and processed. ACE said the Visa work is intended to support customers who rely on fast and convenient cross-border payments, particularly individuals sending money to relatives and friends.

The collaboration also reflects a broader push by payments companies and remittance providers to increase the use of digital rails for international money movement. ACE said both companies share an interest in wider adoption of digital payment solutions and in the continued development of international payments through established technology and industry cooperation.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.