Many businesses still experience constant delays when they move money across borders. These delays are caused by a lack of clear communication between systems, standards, and the businesses that are trying to use them. As a result, cross-border B2B payments take too long, and fees accumulate. All of this holds companies back from operating globally, confidently, and fast. Improvement here can present a significant opportunity, especially given that global cross-border B2B transactions are expected to be worth $18.3 billion by 2030.

Below, we’ll break down what’s improving, what’s still challenging, and how companies can start building smarter payment operations around existing systems.

What’s in this article?

• Why do B2B cross-border payments remain complicated despite digital transformation?
  
• How do banks, payment networks, and fintechs handle large-value international transfers?
  
• What technologies and standards are simplifying reconciliation and reporting?
  
• How can improved payments infrastructure strengthen supplier networks and liquidity planning?
  
• What compliance and FX management challenges remain for multinational firms?
  
• How should businesses structure internal processes to gain efficiency from modern B2B payment tools?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

Why do B2B cross-border payments remain complicated despite digital transformation?

Sending a payment across borders can take days and cost a lot of money. The funds also disappear from view while they’re “in transit.” Here’s why these issues remain.

Fragmented infrastructure

Cross-border payments are tied to the correspondent banking system, which is a chain of banks that hands off the payment until it reaches the destination. Each bank adds fees and delays and has its own processing rules. There’s no shared system across countries, so payment data often gets stripped or reformatted in transit. Payments can pass through 3–5 institutions across different time zones before they settle.

This setup was never designed for transparency or speed. It works, but it’s slow, often expensive, and hard to track.

Low transparency and high friction

With cross-border payments, you might not know where your payment is once it leaves your bank, or the recipient might get less than expected after intermediary fees. There’s often no up-front visibility into the total cost, foreign exchange (FX) rate, or delivery time. All of this makes it hard for businesses to manage cash flow or maintain positive relationships with international partners.

Compliance delays

Every country enforces its own set of rules, including Anti-Money Laundering (AML), sanctions screening, and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. Each intermediary might also rescreen the same transaction. And if anything’s missing or inconsistent, the payment gets flagged or blocked entirely. These issues affect how quickly your payment goes through. Although the user interface (UI) for cross-border payments has gotten better, the networks underneath haven’t.

Until international banking infrastructure is as interoperable as domestic systems, global B2B payments will keep lagging behind everything else your business runs on.

How do banks, payment networks, and fintechs handle large-value international transfers?

Moving money across borders, especially in large amounts, means multiple handoffs, varying speeds, and different rules at every stop. The methods used for these transfers depend on who’s moving the money.

Banks

Large cross-border payments tend to still rely on correspondent banking, a network of bilateral relationships between banks.

If your bank doesn’t have a direct connection to the recipient’s bank, it routes through intermediaries. As each intermediary moves the funds one step closer, you incur fees or added delays and sometimes data loss. You, the sender, often have no visibility into how long the chain is or how much will be taken out along the way.

To address this issue, some banks use SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (GPI). This adds a tracking layer to show when a payment clears each bank in the chain. But the underlying model remains serial, slow, and opaque.

Global networks

Some networks are creating purpose-built systems for B2B transfers. For example, Visa B2B Connect builds direct connections between banks, which removes some intermediaries. In regions such as the EU and parts of Asia, regional payment networks link domestic systems. This makes cross-border transfers feel more like local transfers.

Projects such as Singapore and Thailand’s PayNow-PromptPay linkage allow real-time cross-border transfers using just a phone number. Others, including some global banks, are exploring blockchain-based infrastructure to speed up settlement and add visibility. These efforts aren’t mainstream yet, but they’re reshaping expectations regarding traceability and speed.

Fintech platforms

Modern fintechs avoid the old pathways altogether by operating multiregional networks. They collect funds in one country and pay out locally in another. This way, they sidestep international transfers entirely. Many offer real-time FX, integrations based on application programming interfaces (APIs), and unified compliance under one system. This leads to faster payments, better cost visibility, and fewer bottlenecks.

What technologies and standards are simplifying reconciliation and reporting?

The difficult part of cross-border payments is figuring out what that money was for, where it is, and what it cost by the time it settles. That’s why finance teams have historically spent so much time on payment reconciliation and reporting. Fortunately, the tech is catching up.

Here’s how.

Better data format

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 20022, a new global messaging standard, replaces decades-old formats that weren’t built for modern commerce. With this standard, payment messages have rich, structured fields such as invoice number, purchase order reference, and tax code. That means payments can be automatically matched to the right transaction without manual intervention. By 2027, most cross-border payments via SWIFT will run on ISO 20022.

Real-time tracking and APIs

With SWIFT GPI, every payment has a unique ID you can use to track its path: essentially, a shipping number for funds. You can see exactly when the money reached each intermediary and where it is at any given moment.

Paired with APIs, this lets businesses plug payment status directly into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) or treasury systems, which means they don’t need to look at spreadsheets or log into four different bank portals to check whether funds cleared.

More payment providers are also offering event-based webhooks and real-time FX rate visibility so finance teams can automate confirmation, audit logging, and even exception handling.

Virtual accounts

Virtual accounts or International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs) make it easier to sort inbound payments by source or purpose. You can assign unique virtual accounts to specific customers or geographies, and payments are automatically routed and matched based on the account number itself. That eliminates manual tagging and speeds up cash application.

How can improved payments infrastructure strengthen supplier networks and liquidity planning?

It’s possible to fine-tune cross-border payments and adapt them to your needs. By doing so, you’ll improve your supply chain, relationships, and balance sheet. Here’s how:

• Stronger supplier relationships: Late or unpredictable payments strain supplier relationships, especially across borders. But with faster, traceable payments, suppliers can ship sooner since they know exactly when funds will arrive. And you can confidently pay closer to delivery rather than pad timelines “just in case.” Some businesses are even negotiating discounts in exchange for real-time settlement.

• Better liquidity and capital allocation: When money moves faster, you hold on to it longer. That directly improves working capital. There’s no need to prefund accounts in multiple countries and no need for excess buffers to cover settlement delays. Ultimately, companies can reduce idle balances, move cash more strategically, and adjust short-term investments with tighter control.

• More supply chain optionality: When it’s easy to pay anyone, anywhere, you have more flexibility with sourcing. You’re also prepared if market conditions shift or geopolitical risk affects a region. A supplier in a new market is always more viable when they’re reliably paid.

What compliance and FX management challenges remain for multinational firms?

Even as payments infrastructure improves, two challenges for global payments remain: regulation and currency risk. Both can derail otherwise clean workflows.

Compliance still adds drag

Every country has its own rules (e.g., AML checks, sanctions screening, reporting requirements), and there’s no global standard. Three different banks might screen a single cross-border payment. And inconsistent rules between jurisdictions lead to redundant checks, conflicting formats, and extra documentation. A payment can even be delayed or rejected because a required data field is missing, even if the payment itself is valid.

Automated screening and smarter platforms help, but compliance is always changing. Businesses need to keep internal processes linked to developing global rules.

FX risk is real and expensive

Currency fluctuation, such as a shift in the exchange rate between invoicing and payment, can squeeze your margins or leave your supplier short. Many suppliers pad invoices to account for expected currency movement. But if the FX conversion happens on the recipient’s side, the final amount can vary, which undermines trust and predictability.

To protect against this risk, businesses often hold funds in multiple currencies. But that can tie up capital. Some platforms offer real-time FX rates or lock them in at the point of payment, which helps. But exposure management still takes planning, whether through hedging, multicurrency wallets, or smart payment timing.

Global business requires awareness and good infrastructure to address uneven regulations and currency volatility.

How should businesses structure internal processes to gain efficiency from modern B2B payment tools?

Investing in modern payments infrastructure only goes so far. Messy internal processes will cause you to chase invoices, duplicate effort, and miss out on what the new tools make possible. You want to pay attention to your structure.

Here’s what you can do.

Centralize wherever possible

Centralizing global payments through a core treasury hub can reduce your overhead. So can using providers that let you access local payments infrastructure without local accounts. If you keep balances in fewer places and automate intercompany flows instead of funding every entity manually, you’ll have more control over your finances and more cash visibility.

Integrate payment flows into core systems

Connecting modern payment tools directly to ERP, procurement, or accounting systems avoids the errors that come with manual entry. You can use APIs or native integrations to trigger payments automatically after approvals, while showing real-time payment status and FX data directly where teams already work. When you standardize formats for vendor records, invoice IDs, and country-specific payment details, the system can run without manual fixes.

Choose platforms that simplify the stack

Modern B2B platforms can handle FX, compliance checks, multicurrency accounts, and reporting from a single interface. That means fewer logins, fewer spreadsheets, and fewer chances for something to get missed. With better audit trails and built-in screening, you reduce regulatory risk without adding extra workflows.

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