The Operational Challenges of Scaling Business Payments Across Global Markets

Expanding business payments into new markets can expose the limitations of existing payment infrastructure. Businesses may already rely on payment service providers or correspondent banking networks, but these arrangements don’t always offer the coverage, cost efficiency or visibility they need.

New payment relationships. Local payment requirements. Additional currencies. Liquidity tied up in prefunded accounts. Limited transaction visibility. As businesses extend their operations across more markets, these demands can become harder and more expensive to manage.

The challenge for businesses is finding a way to expand payment reach and improve payment performance without expanding the operational burden at the same rate.

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Six operational challenges that emerge as business payments expand globally

That operational burden tends to show up in six areas as businesses extend their payment footprint.

1. Managing more banking and payment relationships

Existing banks and payment providers may offer reliable coverage in a business’s core markets, but their international networks can have gaps. Even where a destination is supported, payments may involve high fees, limited visibility or slower delivery through intermediary banks.

Overcoming these limitations can mean establishing:

• New bank accounts 
• Correspondent banking relationships
• Payment service providers
• Local payment partners
• Teams of people on the ground to manage this set-up 

And the work continues after a provider is connected. Each relationship can bring its own contracts, onboarding requirements, integrations, account management and ongoing technical maintenance.

As more of these individual relationships are added, businesses end up managing a patchwork of market-specific arrangements, often just to improve coverage or payment performance in a handful of additional markets. That makes it harder to achieve economies of scale as international payment volumes grow.

2. Connecting to different local payment rails

Existing banking and payment providers’ corresponding networks may offer global reach, but that doesn’t always translate into access to the local payment rails businesses need. In some markets, available routes may be expensive, slow or unable to support the required payment method or payout currency, such as USD payments to recipients in countries with a different domestic currency.

Improving that coverage can mean connecting to local ACH systems, instant payment networks, domestic bank-transfer schemes and other market-specific rails. Each can operate differently:

• Technical requirements: One rail may require an API connection, while another relies on bank files, batch uploads or a provider-specific integration.
• Transaction formats: Payment instructions may need to follow different messaging standards, field structures or file formats.
• Beneficiary information: Some rails require additional recipient details, local bank identifiers or payment-purpose information before a transaction can be processed.
• Settlement processes: One system may settle payments instantly, while another clears them in batches or requires funds to be available in advance.
• Operating hours: Some rails operate 24/7, while others are subject to banking windows, daily cut-off times, weekends or public holidays.

Repeating that work market by market is where local payment coverage starts to become difficult to scale efficiently.

3. Managing currencies and liquidity across markets

Adding more markets usually means adding more currencies to fund, hold and convert. That turns payment operations into a treasury challenge as well as a routing one.

As businesses expand into more markets, they may need to maintain separate prefunded accounts with multiple payment partners. Maintaining sufficient balances across these accounts can tie up working capital, leaving funds committed to individual markets even when they could be needed elsewhere. Insufficient liquidity, meanwhile, can delay or prevent payments from being completed.

Payment and treasury teams also need visibility over:

• How much needs to be prefunded with each partner
• How FX affects the payment
• Settlement and cut-off times
• When funds need to be available in each market

As payment coverage expands, businesses have to balance reliable payment delivery with the cost of maintaining liquidity across different providers and currencies. The more capital committed to prefunding arrangements, the less flexibility treasury teams have to deploy those funds elsewhere.

4. Keeping compliance manageable across jurisdictions

Requirements around sanctions, transaction monitoring, payment data and reporting can differ between jurisdictions, even when the underlying payment is part of the same global operation. 

A payment that can be processed with standard beneficiary and transaction information in one market may require additional payment-purpose information, local identifiers or regulatory reporting in another.

The timing of verification also matters. Deferring know your business (KYB) or know your customer (KYC) checks until an end user attempts a transaction can allow a quicker initial rollout, but leave payments on hold once processing begins. Requests for information (RFIs) may then require additional documentation before a payment can proceed, leaving teams to resolve verification gaps while recipients wait for their funds.

Working with multiple banks and payment providers adds further complexity, as each may have its own onboarding processes, screening requirements and procedures for resolving RFIs. The result is that businesses struggle to understand which checks are completed before launch and which may arise during live transactions, and must rely on the local expertise of the financial institutions they work with (banks, PSPs, etc.) to handle the process.

5. Maintaining payment visibility and reconciliation

Traditional payment rails don’t automatically surface intermediate message flows. This lack of visibility makes it difficult for treasury teams to track routing paths, audit lifting fees deducted along the correspondent chain, and perform straight-through reconciliation.

That means being able to determine:

• Was the payment completed, delayed, rejected or returned?
• Did the recipient receive the expected amount after fees and currency conversion?
• Which exchange rate was applied and what charges were incurred?
• Which invoice, supplier or underlying transaction the payment relates to?
• If a payment failed or was delayed, what action is needed to resolve it?

When payments move through intermediary banks or multiple providers, information may be incomplete, delayed or spread across different dashboards, APIs, reports and file formats. Finance teams then have to bring those records together before they can reconcile payments accurately.

As payment volumes and international coverage grow, these gaps in visibility can increase the time spent on reconciliation and payment investigations. They can also make it harder for businesses to provide customers with reliable information about payment progress and the amounts recipients can expect to receive.

6. Maintaining consistent payment performance across markets

Being able to send payments into a market doesn’t necessarily mean those payments meet a business’s expectations for cost, speed or reliability. 

Businesses can encounter differences in:

• Payment speed: Funds may arrive within seconds in one market but take longer in others.
• Cut-off times: Payments submitted after a local deadline may not be processed until the next operating day.
• Fees: The cost of delivering a payment can vary by market, currency, provider and route.
• Settlement: Some payments settle immediately, while others depend on clearing cycles or intermediary banks.
• Success rate and speed of RFI resolution: Payment success rates can vary depending on the provider, market and route. Requests for information (RFIs) can also place payments on hold, with resolution times depending on how quickly additional documentation is requested, reviewed and approved.

This makes predictability harder to maintain as payment coverage grows. A business may technically be able to send money to 20, 50 or 100 markets, but coverage alone says little about how consistently those payments will arrive.

A business may technically be able to send money to 20, 50 or 100 markets, but coverage alone says little about the cost, reliability or quality of those transactions. Poor performance in individual markets can create additional support enquiries, payment investigations and dissatisfaction among recipients.

Interoperability changes how businesses manage this complexity

Payment interoperability is the key to connecting otherwise fragmented payment systems, allowing businesses to access diverse markets and local financial infrastructure through a more consistent payment operation.

By connecting to infrastructure that brings different markets and local payment rails, businesses can extend their reach, improve existing payment routes and reduce the need to establish separate relationships or integrations for every destination. 

Business → Single connection → Local payment infrastructure → Recipient

The differences between currencies, payment systems, regulatory environments and settlement processes still exist, but fewer of them need to be managed directly by the business.

This is ultimately what scaling cross-border payments through global reach on local rails makes possible: broader international reach without requiring the business’s payment operation to expand at the same rate.

How Thunes supports businesses expanding their global payment operations

Thunes puts that interoperable model into practice through its Direct Global Network, helping businesses extend their payment reach, improve access to local payment infrastructure and reduce the complexity of managing international transactions.

1. Broader reach with fewer payment relationships: Through a single connection, businesses can access an extensive network of local payment infrastructure across global markets. This can help address gaps in existing payment coverage without establishing separate relationships in every market.
2. Reduced prefunding and liquidity complexity: Thunes manages FX and liquidity across its network, r eliminating the need for businesses to maintain separate prefunded balances with multiple local partners and helping limit the working capital tied up in those arrangements.
3. Compliance controls across the payment flow: Fortress Compliance embeds risk controls into payment flows, helping businesses manage compliance requirements across different markets and reduce the operational burden of working with multiple payment providers.
4. Improved payment visibility: Thunes’ API provides real-time payment status updates through webhooks, giving businesses greater visibility into transactions across markets. Upfront transparency on payment costs, including FX rates and fees, helps businesses understand the cost of each transaction without incurring unexpected intermediate fees that may hinder the customer experience.
5. More consistent payment performance: The entire network is designed through the lenses of our customers’ business payments expectations. Thunes understands the demands of these types of flows, and applies high standards of performance across the whole network.

Ready to scale your global payment operations? Speak with a Thunes expert to explore how our Direct Global Network can support your expansion.