Fast International Business Payments: The five biggest benefits

Our brand-new international business payments capability means spend management just got a whole lot easier. You can now manage and oversee your reimbursements and invoice payments alongside domestic and international card spend — all from the same platform.

The new feature means making international payments from within the Payhawk platform is way quicker than an international wire transfer, with 55% delivered instantly and 93% within 24 hours.

How is this possible? We’ve partnered with cross-border business payment transfer specialist Wise Platform to deliver frictionless and cost-effective international payment capabilities in +50 currencies* and across +160 countries.

*Some currencies may not apply. For a complete list, please visit wise.com to find out more.

Understanding the need for fast international business payments

As our digital landscape blurs borders, more and more organisations either do business or plan to do business internationally. Research shows that between 2019 and 2020, there was a 9% increase in SMBs conducting business internationally. And 79% of business owners say they want to grow by expanding into new locations.

Working across borders can help your businesses leverage many benefits, from expanding your supplier pool to growing your customer reach. So far, so good. However, wire transfers typically take 1-5 business days to arrive, often costing the business a massive £30 for every transaction with no upfront visibility over fees.

When customers and suppliers have to wait days for wire transfers to land, it not only creates annoying delays and damage relationships but also means your reconciliation (and visibility) isn’t in real time. Typically, international payments are also expensive thanks to hefty transfer fees, meaning they can get very expensive very fast.

Fast, low-cost, reliable cross-border payments are the answer. They empower businesses to grow confidently to expand into new territories, all while enjoying cost and time savings and improved financial transparency.

Manage international payments without leaving Payhawk

At Payhawk, we’re all about making life as easy as possible for financial professionals. And that means removing the reliance on fragmented tools to make managing international transactions seamless.

To get a complete overview of business expenses, you can leverage our comprehensive, cost-effective spend management solution, including corporate cards, data capture, auto-document chasing, customisable categorisation, and international payments. Plus, you can better manage global supplier payments and reimbursements in a single place, get a complete dashboard view across all your entities, and seamlessly sync all your spend data with your ERP.

All of that, and you get to keep a tight grip over spend via sophisticated controls, including custom-multi step approval workflows, to ensure you get the proper oversight and governance for all of your international payments.

How does the new Payhawk feature help you cut costs?

As a finance professional, you constantly look for new ways to cut costs without impacting business performance. Our new international payments feature gives you low-cost transfers that can help you save up to 11 times more (EUR>USD) compared to some banks and other financial institutions.

You now have the freedom to choose the currency when paying your suppliers, too. Let's say you're working with a Chinese supplier, and they request payment in USD; that's totally fine and hassle-free. The new feature offers increased flexibility to conduct business smoothly, regardless of the preferred currency.

When making a payment from within our platform, we suggest enabling the International Payments feature if you can't use a local payment scheme via ACH, BISERA, FPS or SEPA. To do so, you can connect an existing Wise Business account, and if you don't have one, we'll set one up for you in a matter of minutes.

What if a local payment scheme can be used? In this case, we won't make the international payment through Wise. Instead, either a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), Faster Payments Service (FPS), Automated Clearing House (ACH) or BISERA will be used to make the payment. We'll automatically decide on the best transfer option for you to minimise costs.

When will our international payments feature be used? When a payment does NOT use a payment scheme previously mentioned, i.e., you're a UK-based Payhawk customer wanting to pay your US supplier in USD.

The biggest benefits of international payments with Payhawk:

1. Gain better control and visibility: Manage all your payments in one platform and enjoy real-time reconciliation to your ERP or accounting system, giving you ultimate spending visibility. Track spend, reimbursements and invoice payments easily to maintain clear audit trails and comply with regulations.
2. Simplify your global payments: Logging into just one platform to oversee domestic and international payments and spending means you don’t waste time making international payments elsewhere; it’s all centralised, so everyone is looking at the same data.
3. Make global reimbursements easily: With international payments, you can efficiently process and reimburse expenses in multiple currencies and countries without hassle and unnecessary expense.
4. Eliminate manual processes: Manual processes no longer drain your resources. Instead, month-end is faster, more accurate and stress-free for your team thanks to real-time reconciliation of spend data. From automated approval flows to executing payments directly from the platform in a matter of clicks, this new feature lets you move faster while staying in control.
5. Move faster: The new feature means making international payments from within the Payhawk platform is way quicker than an international wire transfer, with 55% delivered instantly and 93% within 24 hours.

To recap

International transactions are a normal part of our modern, global world. Even so, cross-border payments still present significant challenges as your business is expected to juggle numerous tools, cover expensive transfer fees, and manage both domestic and international transactions.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Take complete control of low-cost, rapid international payments with our new feature. Oversee both domestic and international payments from inside the Payhawk platform and save time and money over global business spend like never before.

Ready to transform your international payments? Schedule a demo to see the new feature in action.