Cross-border payment providers have converged on speed and cost — the differentiators from a decade ago are now the baseline. That means the decision criteria have to move too. Here's the five-part framework we use to evaluate whether a provider actually fits a company's operations, not just its rate sheet.

Cross-border payments got faster and cheaper, but McKinsey's analysis shows that initiating the transfer is only a fraction of the work in an international payment. The real friction sits in the manual workflows around it: invoice matching, AP approvals, tax compliance, and ERP reconciliation. With e-invoicing mandates spreading, disconnected systems are getting harder to live with.

Cross-border payments have quietly become one of the most successful infrastructure stories in finance — faster, cheaper, more transparent than a decade ago. McKinsey's latest data puts the volume at roughly $190 trillion. But that success has a side effect: moving money well is no longer a differentiator. The advantage has shifted to what surrounds the payment.

SoFi Bank is now settling its entire card program — $25 billion in volume — through its own dollar-backed stablecoin, running on Mastercard's network. The headline reads like a crypto story. The mechanics say something different, and finance teams should be paying attention to what's happening underneath, not just what shows up on a statement.

Nuvei's acquisition of Payoneer is board-approved and moving toward a 2027 close. That's a long runway — long enough to tempt clients into waiting and seeing. Here's what's actually worth tracking in the meantime.

Part 1 covered when to consider a local entity. Part 2 covered what setting one up actually takes. This is the worksheet — what to actually line up side by side before you make the call, and it's not just cost.

Part 1 of this series covered when a local entity makes sense. Here's what actually goes into setting one up — and why the cost and timeline vary so much from company to company.

Most multinationals never formally decide between setting up a local entity and continuing to pay cross-border fees — they just keep absorbing the fees because nobody's put a number on what the status quo actually costs. Here's how to evaluate which is right for your company.