This piece is posted in AccountingWeb by a CEO of a firm that provides services to small business. The article has some helpful hints and reasons for small businesses to improve their processes around international payments.
‘International growth offers increased opportunities for staff, clients, partnerships and larger vendor networks, but it’s not without its challenges. With international expansion comes international payments, as the right talent may require working with freelancers thousands of miles away and paying in foreign currencies.’
In covering the SMB/SME space during the past couple of years it has become very apparent that fintechs in the payments space have been concentrating in that business size segment (actually many sub-segments of business sizes) for payments. A few of these are mentioned in the article.
Since many of the smallest businesses often have to manage their own bookkeeping, and are busy keeping the lights on, the author lays out some common underlying problems that point to reasons for getting better at international payments. These include lack of efficiency, unhappy recipients (i.e.; checks take forever and can get lost), loose controls and so forth. In effect, the recommendation is to go digital and try to unify processes.
‘Handling global and domestic payments from a single platform significantly reduces the international payment challenges that cause many businesses and bookkeepers to struggle. From the perspective of outsourced bookkeeping, using a unified platform allows you to scale work successfully. When everything is in one place and operates under the same workflow, you can boost efficiency across the board.’
Worth a read if you have some interest in the space.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
