I have met with this problem several times and many others too met with this problem. We consider global accessibility a great advantage of BTC with very good reason. Technically, BTC is available from anywhere, anytime. The issue is coming down to communication. Assuming that your partner is not a BTC holder already, how do you have him exchange his money into BTC?
Well, first he must have a bitcoin wallet, for him to receive his bitcoin if he will convert his money to bitcoin, and the one that will going to help him with that is you. Since he is your friend and you want your transaction to be fast, then tell him that you are going to sell your bitcoin to him, so that he can convert his money to bitcoin, simple as that.
Even when BTC has these advantages, other payment processors have not and when people have to exchange money from any other payment processor into BTC, transaction issue comes from the other payment processor like PP holding back money or certain banks do not execute transactions in certain time intervals. How do we get around this?
I thought a payment processor where you can pay with a simple SMS or call from your phone credits and receive some BTC would be very useful.
It is because not all the payment processors accepts bitcoin, like for example, there are just some banks that is accepting bitcoin for the supported transactions that they have, like here in country(Philippines), one of the bank account here in the Philippines is accepting bitcoin, here is the article
http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/02/08/philippines-bangko-sentral-recognizes-bitcoin-payment-system/