Share Dialog
Share Dialog
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Pre-pandemic, it was increasingly common for tech companies to have employees and operations in more than one country. Post pandemic, it’s almost guaranteed. The benefits of distributed workforces are obvious: access to talent, direct access to customers and partners in more markets, faster. This is especially true in Latin America where entrepreneurship is exploding.
While a multi-country talent and customer strategy help companies scale faster — it creates the corresponding complexity for finance teams. Very quickly a company will find that they need to pay for expenses in multiple countries, multiple currencies, using many different payment rails (credit cards for local expenses, the local bank-to-bank rails for larger transfers, wires for international money transfer, etc.). It’s not just making the payments that is challenging — they then all need to be reconciled on the backend, a process that takes weeks after each month-end to close the books. It’s slow and prone to error. Why has this problem persisted? The answer, of course, lies under the hood.
Every country has their own:
Bank transfer system (e.g., ACH in the US, SPEI in Mexico, CIP and now PIX in Brazil, etc.)
Rules around who can issue a credit card (e.g., in Mexico and Brazil you can get your own BIN and be a principal member of Visa or Mastercard, in Canada & the US you need a banking partner)
Approved payment processors
Currencies (obviously)
Bank accounts
Many countries lack an elegant solution for “just” that country. For example, in Mexico and Brazil, it’s a challenge to get a corporate credit card and still difficult to do payouts despite the presence of real-time payments.
Pre-pandemic, it was increasingly common for tech companies to have employees and operations in more than one country. Post pandemic, it’s almost guaranteed. The benefits of distributed workforces are obvious: access to talent, direct access to customers and partners in more markets, faster. This is especially true in Latin America where entrepreneurship is exploding.
While a multi-country talent and customer strategy help companies scale faster — it creates the corresponding complexity for finance teams. Very quickly a company will find that they need to pay for expenses in multiple countries, multiple currencies, using many different payment rails (credit cards for local expenses, the local bank-to-bank rails for larger transfers, wires for international money transfer, etc.). It’s not just making the payments that is challenging — they then all need to be reconciled on the backend, a process that takes weeks after each month-end to close the books. It’s slow and prone to error. Why has this problem persisted? The answer, of course, lies under the hood.
Every country has their own:
Bank transfer system (e.g., ACH in the US, SPEI in Mexico, CIP and now PIX in Brazil, etc.)
Rules around who can issue a credit card (e.g., in Mexico and Brazil you can get your own BIN and be a principal member of Visa or Mastercard, in Canada & the US you need a banking partner)
Approved payment processors
Currencies (obviously)
Bank accounts
Many countries lack an elegant solution for “just” that country. For example, in Mexico and Brazil, it’s a challenge to get a corporate credit card and still difficult to do payouts despite the presence of real-time payments.
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