Scaling internationally? Five questions founders need to ask about moving money

International expansion can create hidden payment costs. Understanding where they arise is the first step towards managing them.

Going global is no longer a distant business milestone. A founder can find an overseas customer before hiring a finance specialist, or pay an international supplier before building an end-to-end treasury process. Global digital platforms make international trade accessible early. But access doesn’t mean simplicity. Once a business starts receiving or sending money in different currencies, the payment process becomes part of the growth model. Foreign exchange spreads, transaction charges, intermediary fees, delayed settlement, failed payments and reconciliation work can all affect the cash available for growth.

In fact, Airwallex commissioned the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) to look at the cost of hidden payment fees and found that UK SMEs lose an average of £188,000 a year, which covers foreign exchange costs, payment delays and the staff time required to manage or fix cross-border payment problems. Founders do not need to be finance experts but understanding where money comes from, where it goes and how much it costs to move, is a useful starting point.
With that in mind, here are the five questions I want founders to ask as they scale, not afterwards.

What’s the total cost of moving your money?
The advertised transaction fee is the easiest number to see. It’s also the least reliable guide to the real cost. Take a defined amount, such as £1,000, and follow it through the entire journey. What exchange rate is applied? What does the recipient actually receive? Are there intermediaries or receiving fees? How long does the transaction take to reconcile? What happens if something goes wrong? Headline fees rarely tell the whole story. Compare the amount ultimately received, the exchange rate applied and the time needed to resolve or reconcile a payment. Airwallex’s research found that UK businesses spend an average of eight hours a week fixing cross-border payment issues. For a small team, that is not an abstract inconvenience. It may be a full day that could have been spent selling, serving customers or improving the business. Review several months of payments by currency and corridor. Look for the routes that create the most cost, delay or administrative work. The pattern is often more revealing than any individual transaction.

Are you doing enough to prevent payments from failing?
A failed payment is never just a failed payment. It may leave a supplier waiting, interrupt a service, create duplicate work or damage confidence in a growing company. Someone has to check the details, find the error, respond to questions and possibly send the money again. The causes vary – incorrect account information, missing fields, compliance checks, unsupported routes and mismatched instructions can all play a part. The useful response is to record why payments fail, rather than treating every incident as bad luck or simply accepting it. Our research estimated that fixing a failed payment costs small businesses around 0.13% of the total transaction value, compared with 0.06% for large companies, indicating that smaller firms are disproportionately affected due to having less capacity to absorb this disruption. The controls are not glamorous, but they work. Check beneficiary information before release, keep supplier records current, use consistent approval steps and make sure more than one person understands the full workflow. As payment volumes rise, automated validation and clear ownership become increasingly valuable.

When did you last benchmark your payment provider?
Businesses often keep the provider they chose when they were smaller. Changing something fundamental can feel risky when everything appears to work. But “it works” is not the same as “it still fits”. The right provider depends on the business. A bank may offer valuable credit, treasury services, local knowledge or an established support relationship. A specialist provider may offer different capabilities in particular currencies, markets or integrations while other businesses may prefer a combination. The decision should be based on evidence. Compare total cost, settlement times, supported currencies, reliability, customer service, accounting integrations, approval controls, fraud prevention, safeguarding arrangements and regulatory status. Consider resilience too as concentrating every payment through one provider can create its own risk. We found that almost a quarter (24%) of small businesses had moved to a non-bank provider, compared with 45% of large companies. That difference reflects different levels of need, awareness or appetite for change. But regardless of provider, the potential gains from addressing cross-border payment frictions are significant. If these frictions were eliminated and firms could claw back the money they’re currently wasting, UK finance leaders say they would reinvest the money into developing new products (44%) whilst also exploring new international market opportunities (31%). By benchmarking your setup regularly, especially before entering a new market, founders won’t lose sight of the real numbers, whilst also mitigating the risk of ongoing financial complacency.

Are you paying efficiently or simply out of habit?
Payment habits have a way of becoming policy without anyone deciding that they should. Invoices are paid when they arrive. Several transfers go to the same supplier in one week. Different teams create different approval routines. At ten transactions a month, these choices may barely register. At 1,000, they can create a meaningful cost and a considerable reconciliation headache. Where contracts, cash flow and supplier relationships allow, consolidating appropriate payments may reduce fixed charges and simplify administration. That does not mean delaying money owed to employees or suppliers. It doesn’t mean ignoring early-payment discounts or creating a new working-capital problem in the name of efficiency. It means examining the pattern. Assess whether several payments would be cheaper or clearer if settled together. Check that payment dates are aligned with cash inflows. Consider whether many people are touching the same process. Confirm if approval limits remain clear and always ask to ensure that someone is checking whether the process still makes sense. Good controls should not make a business feel slower. Clear ownership, sensible spending limits and separation of duties can improve control while removing avoidable handoffs. The best payment process is not the one with the most steps. It is the one that makes the right steps obvious.

Have you built international payment delays into your cash-flow planning?
Revenue is not cash, just like a sale is not the same thing as money available in the bank. That distinction matters in every business. It matters even more when customers pay from different markets, through different banking systems and on different settlement timetables. If a forecast assumes that every payment arrives on the same day, the business can look healthy on paper and still run short of working capital. We’ve estimated with Cebr that cross-border payment friction locks an estimated £10.5bn of working capital out of the UK economy each year. The practical response for an individual business is simple, even if the analysis takes work, measure actual settlement times by market, currency and route, then put those patterns into the forecast. It’s important to separate the expected from the uncertain, maintain a buffer for slower corridors, set escalation points for overdue receipts and identify which obligations cannot be delayed. If a route repeatedly takes longer or needs manual intervention, investigate it rather than quietly absorbing the problem. Not every delay is a failure – some reflect legitimate compliance checks, time-zone differences or local banking systems. The aim is to know which delays are structural, which are preventable and what they mean for available cash to make informed financial decisions.

Global ambition needs global infrastructure
International expansion will always bring complexity, but inefficiency shouldn’t simply be accepted as the price of going global. More than half of UK businesses we surveyed revealed that cross-border payment friction had caused them to scale back their international growth plans, showing how an area often treated as a back-office concern, can become a real barrier to growth.
For entrepreneurs, the answer doesn’t have to be a wholesale overhaul. It starts with understanding whether the way you move money is keeping pace with the business you’re building. Today’s entrepreneurs can build global businesses from day one. How their money moves needs to be part of how they scale.