Do you transfer money abroad regularly as part of your business operations? It could pay off to reassess the services you use, in turn helping your bottom line. With more digital payments worldwide and an increasingly competitive payments provider space, it’s time to find the best solution to your cross-border transfers.
How to select a good payment provider?
As a business, you want your operations to be as streamlined as possible. Every minute spent configuring international transactions is a minute you could spend doing something else.
Choosing an international payments partner requires a deep dive into your own requirements. These can sound like:
It’s also important that your provider or platform follows international taxation and monetary regulations, and has a good reputation.
International payment providers have a range of different fee structures, which can be confusing when you’re trying to make comparisons.
Some common payment fee structures include:
There may also be clauses that affect these fees either by them increasing or decreasing, including:
Do be aware that banks and other payment providers may not offer market rates (or even the rates close to it) for currency conversions. If this is a concern for your business, then the market rates should be accounted for under the fees section. You can compare different currency pairs to the market rate to see how they differ.
For some businesses, it’s about finding a global payment provider or platform that has a basic, easy-to-understand fee structure that they promise won’t change. It’s about hunting for integrity and transparency over the overall fee costs. For other businesses, it’s about doing the calculations and finding the absolute best provider based on the execution speed or exotic currencies offering.
While you may be accustomed to settlements for international transfers taking days to even weeks, this doesn’t have to be the case. Modern technology allows that means international payments can be made near-instantly, whether currency conversions are made or not. You will need to check that near-instant payment offerings do not have exorbitant fees. Blockchain-based services such as DTransfer allow sending money at a fraction of a regular fee price.
The technologies in place to do international transfers vary. These include methods such as wire transfers, ACH, SEPA, Visa and Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe. Each of these methods may only work in certain regions or between certain countries or even between certain financial institutions.
A global payments platform can save you a lot of money on international transfers by allowing you to send money internationally using various payment methods other than a wire transfer.
Instead of coordinating multiple different international payment methods in-house, look to a payments platform that does it all.
Whether it’s paying your staff their salaries into their overseas bank accounts or paying bills to an offshore provider, recurring payments need to be configurable as part of your provider’s platform. After all, the more you automate, the more time you save.
We’re one of the new breeds of international payments providers offering businesses near-instant payments with low fees and market-rate exchanges on currencies. Talk to us at DTransfer about how we can help you do international business with less friction.