BPI, Westpac team up to ease Aussie transfers

Major lender Bank of the Phil­ippine Islands (BPI) and West­pac Banking Corp. (Westpac), Australia’s first bank, recently entered into a strategic part­nership to facilitate low cost and fast transfer of funds from Filipinos living in Australia to their families in the Philippines.

The recently launched payment service called LitePay International (LitePay) sends money from a Westpac ac­count online directly to a BPI account within hours.

The BPI account comes with a debit card so the bene­ficiary can access the account anytime, anywhere through over 2,000 BPI ATMs nation­wide, free of charge.

LitePay runs on a secure platform that uses strict in­ternal control systems and in­trusion safeguards to ensure funds are protected during the course of the cross-border transaction.

LitePay payments are di­rect transactions between two identified parties with no ag­gregation and provide individ­ual Westpac customers with a transparent, low cost and fast efficient solution to send mon­ey to the Philippines through the Westpac Online and West­pac Mobile Banking portals.

The service innovation is the first of its kind from Aus­tralia into the Philippines, of­fering a more affordable way to make cross-border payments.

LitePay is expected to sup­port Filipinos working in Aus­tralia who make high hundreds of thousands of transfers to family back home each year.

Westpac charges a small fee (currently at five Australian dollars per payment). There is a limit of 3,000 Australian dol­lars per customer per day and the funds can be distributed beyond BPI to any bank in the Philippines.

“The partnership with Westpac allows Filipinos in Australia to conveniently send money to the Philippines any­time anywhere.” Marie Jose­phine Ocampo, BPI senior vice president and head of Pay­ments and Remittance Group, said.

Mike Baldwin, Westpac’s Head of Transactional Solu­tions, Global Transactional Services, said plans to expand LitePay into other geographies are on the horizon.

“The Philippines is an im­portant market for Australia and as the overseas payments industry continues to evolve, we look forward to extending this secure and internationally compliant, platform into other markets,” he said.

This latest partnership builds on BPI’s strategy to con­tinue expanding its interna­tional funds transfer service of­ferings to better serve Filipinos around the world.