Global expansion becomes harder when treasury is treated as an afterthought rather than part of the underlying payments infrastructure.
Every founder who has expanded abroad knows the ritual. You pick the market, you fly out, you incorporate, and somewhere in the checklist between the lawyers and the first hire sits a line that says “open a local bank account”. Once that box is ticked, it can feel as though the financial side of the expansion has been taken care of.
In reality, it has barely begun. A local account answers one narrow question: where will money arrive in this market? It says nothing about the questions that will actually consume your time and your margin over the first years. How does money get from that account to headquarters, and how much will it cost? Who converts your currencies, and at what spread? How much cash needs to sit idle in that country for operations to run? And who is accountable when a payment goes missing between four banks in three time zones? A functioning international treasury holds the answers to those questions. Yet most companies never design one. They assemble one, account by account, market by market, and then wonder why moving their own money has become a second job.
Fragmentation is a cost centre that never invoices you
A treasury assembled in this way has a predictable shape: a domestic bank at home, a different bank in each market, an FX broker somewhere in the middle, and a payments provider or two at the edges. Each relationship was the sensible choice on the day it was signed, and each provider does its own job perfectly well. Together they form a machine with no operator: the failure is not in any single part. It is that nobody designed it cohesively.
The direct costs hide in the seams. Every provider prices its own layer, conversion happens where it suits the intermediary rather than where it suits you, and no single statement ever shows the total cost of moving the money from start to finish..
The scale of what flows through those seams is vast: international payment flows reached roughly $179 trillion in 2024, and McKinsey estimates that lower-value payments, the kind growing companies make, account for about 10% of that value but close to a third of the industry’s entire revenue pool. The smallest payments carry the fattest margins. If you are a mid-sized company moving money across borders, you are not a rounding error in this system. You are its profit centre.
The indirect costs are worse because they compound. Finance teams at scaling companies spend days each month reconciling statements from providers that do not talk to each other, chasing payments that cleared one system but not the next, and maintaining spreadsheets that are, in effect, a handmade ledger of the company’s own money. This is time spent managing financial infrastructure rather than running and growing the business.
Design the treasury before entering the next market
Treating money movement as infrastructure you design once, and deliberately, before expansion is the way to avoid costly decisions. Three questions do most of the work.
First: where will money sit, and in whose name? If client or operating funds sit pooled behind a provider’s own licence, your claim on your own money depends on that provider’s ledger and its solvency. Insist on accounts held in your name. It is the difference between owning your cash and being owed it.
Next question: how will money move, and with what certainty? Speed is the metric everyone quotes and the wrong one to optimise. A payment that arrives fast most of the time is worth less than one that arrives when promised every time, because it is the uncertainty, not the average, that forces you to hold buffers. Settlement certainty is what lets those pre-funded balances be reduced.
Third: how many counterparties stand between you and settlement? Every intermediary in the chain is a cost, a delay, and a decision-maker who can cut you off.
The modern answer is consolidation: a small number of correspondent institutions now exist to manage the whole process, holding funds in named accounts and clearing directly into local payment systems across markets. This can turn expansion into more of a configuration exercise and less of a search for another banking relationship.Whether you use one provider or several, the principle stands: count the hops, and ask each provider to draw you the full chain from your account to final settlement. The ones with short chains will happily draw it. The ones with long chains will send you a brochure.
In conclusion
The companies that treat money movement as designed infrastructure enter their third and fourth markets at configuration speed, with cash that works as hard abroad as it does at home. The ones that tick the bank-account box find out, eighteen months later, that they have built the problems of the banking system into their own balance sheet.
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- Digital Payments