February release notes: enhanced SWIFT and ACH payments, improved dispute management, and expanded local transfer capabilities

This month, we’re introducing key updates to improve your payment processes, enhance control, and streamline operations. From real-time card tracking and expanded local transfer capabilities to more cost-effective ACH and SWIFT options, these features empower you to optimize workflows, reduce costs, and boost payment success.

Business Accounts

Improve flexibility and efficiency with expanded local transfer capabilities 🌏

Several key improvements have been made to our local transfer capabilities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, enhancing both the flexibility and efficiency of cross-border payments.

Hong Kong: You can now make instant FPS bank transfers in HKD/CNY to Proxy IDs like phone numbers, emails, FPS identifiers, and even Hong Kong Identity Card (HKID) numbers, making local transfers easier and more accessible than ever before.

Singapore: Instant FAST bank transfers in SGD can now be sent to PayNow IDs, including phone numbers, virtual payment addresses, and personal or business IDs, reducing friction and increasing transfer flexibility.

Mexico: We’ve improved local MXN bank transfers, offering faster, cost-efficient transfers with reduced fees, no cutoff times, and instant settlement.

Vietnam: We have enabled real-time bank account verification and now support up to 140-character transfer references for more reliable, accurate payments.

Bangladesh: B2C payments are now supported for BDT transfers, enabling higher transaction limits and expanded use cases for businesses.

Pakistan: PKR bank transfers now support higher transaction limits and more use cases, including freelancing payments, with faster transfers and no cutoff times.

These upgrades significantly improve efficiency, reduce costs, and expand the use cases for local transfers across key regions.

Experience faster, cost-effective transfers with expanded US and South Africa coverage 🇺🇲🇿🇦

We’ve made significant enhancements to our local transfer capabilities in the United States and South Africa, providing even more flexibility and speed for our customers.

United States: You can now make instant bank transfers in USD via FedNow, with a transaction limit of 500,000 USD and instant flight times. This marks a major improvement over previous non-instant transfer methods like ACH, Fedwire, and Paper Checks.

South Africa: You can now make local bank transfers in ZAR with no transaction limit, providing a faster, more cost-effective solution compared to the previous SWIFT method. Transfers are processed with a T+1 business day flight time.

These updates improve both speed and efficiency, allowing for faster, seamless payouts in key regions.

Gain more control over direct debit with new Netherlands EUR Global Accounts 🇳🇱

We’re excited to announce the general release of Netherlands EUR Global Accounts, empowering you to seamlessly handle direct debit payouts within SEPA regions.

All customers can now create Netherlands EUR Global Accounts with the following capabilities:

• Collect EUR locally via SEPA, SEPA Instant, and TARGET2

• Settlement time: 0-2 days (SEPA), 0-1 day (SEPA Instant & TARGET2)

• Transaction limit: None (SEPA & TARGET2), 100K EUR per transaction (SEPA Instant)

• Payout EUR via SEPA Core Direct Debit with no maximum limit

These improvements enable businesses to authorise third-party billers to debit EUR funds directly from their Airwallex wallet, streamlining payouts and expanding payment flexibility across Europe. You can also receive EUR funds directly into your Airwallex wallet from marketplaces.

For more information, please refer to our product documentation and support articles.

Spend

Global Entity Management now supports Xero 🌐

We're excited to announce the availability of Global Entity Management for all Xero customers, expanding on our previous support for NetSuite. With Global Entity Management, customers using Xero can centrally manage their financial operations across multiple entities. Key benefits include:

• Control and manage global spend: Create and maintain a global set of approval policies rather than redundant policies for each account. Review and approve all expenses, reimbursements, and bills in one place.

• Single source of truth for financial information: View aggregated financial information in one place across all of their entities and accounts, including account balances, payments, and reports.

• Simplified user management: Centrally manage and invite users across all entities and accounts.

• Central integration management: View and manage all external integrations in a single place.

Stay tuned for additional updates, including support for QuickBooks customers. To activate Global Entity Management, contact your customer support representative or account manager.

Payments

Easier dispute management ⚙️

We have upgraded dispute management to make it easier for you to manage disputes. Disputes can happen when your customer disputes the legitimacy of a payment and can be a headache for any business. With the upgraded dispute management experience, you will now find more useful guidance on how to handle disputes, so that you can make the best decisions for your business.

To date, merchants using the upgraded dispute management have seen up to 50% improvements in winning dispute challenges. With this upgrade, you can now also choose how you’d like to receive dispute notifications by subscribing to email notifications, summary emails or webhook notifications.

For more details, visit the product documentation on disputes, or check out the FAQs on our Help Centre.

Greater payment flexibility and reliability for recurring payments 🏦

We have made multiple enhancements that can boost payment success of recurring payments and provide you with more flexibility to manage them.

Increased recurring payment success

We are leveraging automated card detail updates to help you reduce failed recurring payments caused by expired, lost, or replaced cards. This new service automatically fetches updated card information directly from the card networks, to ensure that payments are processed without interruptions.

More flexibility for saving payment details

If you are offering customers both subscription based products and one-off purchases, you can take advantage of our newest API version for saving card details to improve your customer’s checkout experience. With the newest API version, you can enable your customers to use the same saved card details for both one-off purchases (customer-initiated payments) and recurring payments (merchant-initiated payments).

This is currently available for Native API and split card integrations, with plans to expand to other integration methods soon.

Seamless migration from other PSPs to Airwallex

Thanks to improvements to our saved card migration capabilities, we now help you seamlessly migrate recurring payments from a third-party PSP to Airwallex. With this, you can take advantage of Airwallex Payment’s benefits without worrying about interruptions to your existing customers with recurring payments or saved card details.

Coming soon: PayPal with multi-currency settlement and Venmo for US merchants 🛒

We’re excited to share the upcoming upgrade to our PayPal integration as well as the addition of Venmo as a new payment method for merchants with US entities. This upgrade enables multi-currency like-for-like (L4L) settlement, allowing you to use proceeds from PayPal for spending with Airwallex Cards or international transfers without unnecessary FX conversions.

With this update, you can skip PayPal registration and manage the end-to-end PayPal transaction lifecycle directly within Airwallex, eliminating the need to maintain separate PayPal accounts. The simplified payment method fee structure—free from hidden fees like payout costs—ensures greater transparency and lower operational costs.

Shoppers can also choose to pay with Venmo and benefit from a smoother checkout for both PayPal and Venmo.

Platform API and Embedded Finance

Get real-time visibility and streamlined tracking for physical card deliveries 💳

We’ve rolled out exciting improvements to the physical card experience for Issuing API customers, addressing one of the biggest pain points: visibility into card dispatch and delivery status. With the new delivery_details field added to the Client API cards object, you can now easily track when cards are printed, dispatched, or encountered issues in manufacturing.

For DHL Express deliveries, more granular statuses like IN_TRANSIT and OUT_FOR_DELIVERY are available. Plus, with new notification web hooks, your team no longer needs to manually check for updates, your customers get notified automatically.

Tracking for physical cards delivered by standard mail depends on the delivery setup and is currently available for cards issued to accounts in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Israel.

This update boosts operational efficiency, providing better control, enhanced customer experience, and streamlined workflows for enterprise customers. For more information, visit our product documentation.

Reduct costs and gain flexibility with enhanced SWIFT and ACH payment features 💲

Key enhancement to our Payouts APIs improve flexibility and reduce costs for both international and domestic transfers.

You can now specify an intermediary bank SWIFT code when creating SWIFT transfers via API. This is especially helpful when recipients require routing through a specific intermediary bank, providing more control and customisation in your transactions.

Additionally, we’ve introduced Next Day ACH for USD local transfers, offering a 30% lower cost than Same Day ACH. 

For more details, visit our product documentation on how to create a new beneficiary and how to create transfer API reference.