Visa Inc is paying $250.6 million to buy Earthport Plc, a cross-border payment platform for banks and businesses that are also partners of Ripple. The stock deal, in which the Visa unit offered 30 pence for each Earthport share, gives the U.K. payments company a value that is four times the stock’s closing price on Monday.

Earthport claims its services provide banks and money transfer firms a lower cost method for international transactions, with the banks and money transfer firms having to deal with one company instead of several within the payments channel. The company’s stock has been under pressure this year with Reuters reporting shares have dipped more than 28 percent due to losses and expenses that are growing. The company said in November, according to Reuters, that there was a need to make a “fundamental” change to its strategy.

They are a regulated financial institution under the auspices of the UK’s Financial Conducct Authority (FCA), transforming the future of cross-border payments. They provide their clients with access to a global payment network, maintaining local banking partnerships, through which client business is settled directly via local clearing to banked beneficiaries in over 87 countries with clients including Bank of America, Hyperwallet, Transferwise, and Payoneer.

For Visa, cross-border payments, or transactions that involve parties in two or more countries, represents a growing business. The volume of such payments rose 10 percent in the 2018 fiscal year, Visa said in October. Earthport, which counts Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Japan Post Bank among its clients, said Visa’s offer was a revised proposal that followed an indicative offer from the U.S. company last month.

Earthport also partnered with Ripple in 2015 to offer real-time payments abilities for its banking partners using distributed ledger technology. In October Earthport declared that BNP Paribas came on board as a customer, with the payments company providing Automated Clearing House (ACH) cross-border payment services for BNP. At the time Earthport said BNP Paribas Fortis, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas and Belgium’s largest bank, with annual revenues of €43 billion, will be the first to deploy the services.

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