Cross-border stablecoin payments testing underway at SAP

Multinational software company SAP is now testing cross-border USDC payments on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet.

The test will be open to any interested businesses globally and has been in the works since the last quarter, Bernhard Schweizer, the chief product expert and project lead of SAP Digital Currency Hub, told Blockworks.

Interested participants will receive USDC on the test network that can be used to pay for sample invoices, Schwizer explained. 

“As part of the test drive, every registrant receives an owned system and can use test coins on the Goerli testnet to make payments and receive payments to a predefined test business partner,” he said. “The objective of the test drive is to gauge market interest and to collect feedback on the solution.”

Existing cross-border payments are slow and expensive, taking up to seven days for the money to be transferred, SAP noted in an earlier blog post.

After numerous discussions with small and medium-sized businesses, Schweizer noted that cross-border payments are still a sore spot.

Read more: International payments are a pain — SAP touts a blockchain solution

“We believe digital money is a good means to overcome the existing pain points: high-fees, long transaction times and lack of transparency,” he said.  

Moving forward, SAP plans to integrate blockchain-based payment processes into its mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, Schweizer explained.  

This will make “it a seamless experience to issue an invoice that allows the customer to pay in a digital currency and likewise execute a payment with a digital currency as part of a normal ERP payment run,” Schwizer said.

SAP is also looking into other crypto solutions, noting that cross-border payments are just the beginning. 

“There are further payment scenarios like commerce and employee payments that could be appealing for payments with digital or cryptocurrencies,” Schwizer said.

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