Fintech Firms Leverage International Payments to Win Small Business Customers
Small businesses are no longer confined to local supply chains. From ingredients sourced in Mexico to electronics from China and packaging from Southeast Asia, today’s Main Street businesses operate with the footprint that once belonged only to large corporations. And the financial technology companies paying attention to this shift are quietly rewriting the rules of SMB banking.
Cross-border payments for small businesses have moved from a niche treasury function to a daily operational necessity, according to Pratik Khowala, global head of transfer solutions at Mastercard. “SMBs make cross-border payments on a daily basis, not an occasional basis. It’s becoming part of mainstream banking rather than episodic or occasional banking,” Khowala said.
New PYMNTS Intelligence research conducted in collaboration with Mastercard found that nearly 6 in 10 U.S. SMBs now source goods or production inputs from overseas suppliers. That number signals a structural change, not a trend, in how small businesses operate, and it is placing enormous pressure on the payment providers that serve them.
Speed sits at the center of the conversation. According to the research, 43% of SMBs now rank speed as the primary factor when selecting a cross-border payments provider. For businesses managing tight margins and unpredictable supply chains, payment delays are not just inconvenient, they directly affect cash flow and supplier relationships. “If money takes two days to reach the supplier, the sending party needs to provision it two days ahead,” Khowala explained. “If they can move money instantly, that helps them manage their cash flow predictability much better.”
This is exactly where FinTechs are seizing ground. Unlike large corporates with dedicated treasury teams, SMBs want intuitive platforms where they can execute payment transactions simply and efficiently, and FinTechs have built precisely that. While traditional banks have historically treated cross-border payments as a secondary offering, FinTech challengers have made it a front-door product, one that is pulling SMBs into entirely new banking relationships.
FinTechs are now expanding beyond cross-border payments to take deposits and offer local payment services, services that banks once considered exclusively their territory. “A cross-border specialist is providing a full banking solution to an SME. Banks start losing those relationships, and cross-border is just a starting point,” Khowala warned.
The stakes are high for traditional financial institutions. Banks that fail to provide intuitive, flexible, and transparent solutions risk losing not just cross-border payment volume but entire SMB customer relationships.
Mastercard’s response to this pressure is Mastercard Move, a platform designed to support faster settlement, end-to-end payment transparency, and expanded global reach. Mastercard Move currently reaches more than 200 countries and territories and supports over 150 currencies, enabling banks to offer it as a white-label service so they can retain customer trust while upgrading the underlying payments infrastructure. “They have the trust of their SMBs. They don’t know that Move is in the background, but they offer it as a service powered by Move,” Khowala said.
For small businesses navigating an increasingly global supply chain, the expectation is clear: cross-border payments for small businesses must now match the speed, transparency, and reliability of any other digital financial service. The FinTechs building toward that standard are not just winning payments, they are winning customers.
