Veem opens up global payments platform to developers with new API

If you’ve ever tried to do business across borders, you know how painful it can be to send a wire transfer, wait for the payment to clear the bank and pay a set of fees along the way. Veem is a startup trying to simplify all of that for SMBs by providing a platform to ease the international transfer of funds between businesses. Today, it announced it was opening up that capability to developers in the form of an API.

Up until now, users could go to the Veem website, or they could use the direct integration inside Quickbooks, Xero and Netsuite, three accounting platforms that are popular with SMBs (small to medium sized businesses).

To use Veem, the parties involved simply sign up online on the Veem website to create an account. Instead of requiring a ton of information to make the transfer, all you need is an email. You enter the amount and the email of the recipient and Veem handles the cross-border transfers and makes money on the exchange rate.

It’s worth noting that general foreign exchange fees are typically around 4 percent with bank wire transfers. Depending on the transaction, Veem takes between a half and 2 percent on exchange, making it a much cheaper and easier option for small businesses to use.

When small businesses make these kinds of international monetary transfers, there are also rules and regulations to deal with, which Veem can also handle including bills of sale or lading and other details the receiving bank may require.

This is really where opening this up to other platforms other than the three accounting packages could shine. It enables programmers to add international payments to any app by connecting to the Veem API.

This not only opens up this capability to developers, greatly simplifying something that’s actually quite complicated, it provides a way for Veem to appear inside more applications without dealing with the integration themselves. It also provides a way to build Veem usage without having users go directly to the Veem site.

The company does not charge developers for connecting to Veem, making it an attractive option for programmers. Instead, it continues to make money off of the exchange rate fees

Veem launched in 2014 and has raised over $44 million.