The Treasurers’ Guide To Simplifying Cross-Border Payments

The global economy is more interconnected than ever, with more companies doing business abroad than at any time in recorded history.

On one hand, this brings opportunity, with businesses reaching more customers in more markets. On the other hand, it also means they must learn to navigate a highly fragmented and complex international payments ecosystem.

Each country has its own rules and regulations dictating how businesses can make and receive payments, as well as its own, unique financial infrastructure. Moving funds across borders means moving them in and out of these myriad systems. Overcoming these regularity barriers can make international payments expensive, slow and highly uncertain, especially when using legacy payment rails like ACH.

How can international businesses streamline their cross-border operation systems to overcome these frictions?

In the inaugural edition of the Simplifying Cross-Border Payments Playbook, in collaboration with SWIFT, PYMNTS surveys the global cross-border payments landscape and expounds on the four key factors that businesses need to consider when choosing how to make and receive payments across borders.

The ideal cross-border payment solution provides speed, security and compliance and transparency, while also being ubiquitous enough to be widely available for use. Legacy payment cannot meet all five of these requirements — but real-time payments solutions can. By leveraging digital technology to ensure automatic regulatory security and compliance, as well as sending and receiving transmission data in a matter of minutes or even seconds, real-time payments solutions meet four of the five criteria for ideal cross-border payments solutions.

For precisely this reason, the number of real-time payments systems have been rapidly proliferating around the globe, with 57 real-time payment rails operating in more than 72 countries in 2019, and even more under construction.

The only problem is, no one of these 57 systems is ubiquitous enough to be universally applicable.

The Simplifying Cross-Border Payments Playbook details how payments providers around the globe are tackling this ubiquity problem to bring the benefits of real-time payments to the cross-border payments ecosystem.

To learn more, download the playbook.