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Posted: Tue 29th Sep 2026
9 min read
If you asked small businesses about the biggest barriers to export, they’d say complicated paperwork, Brexit, a lack of confidence in global stability and point to fluctuating tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, for example. They probably wouldn’t talk about cross-border payments.
Earlier this month, I spoke to Sam Coyne, European CEO of Currenxie, who has spent 12 years watching small businesses navigate this terrain. According to Sam, the biggest issue isn't the one most owners expect when they set out to export – it’s navigating cost unpredictability.
For businesses trading internationally, whether they have suppliers abroad, customers abroad, or both, Sam says four things matter with payments: speed, security, fees, and one that gets far less attention than it should – predictability.
He says:
"Predictability is very, very important, right? You're trying to manage your cash flow. You're trying to plan.
"You might have T+30 on an invoice, but if you're not sure if your bank is going to take two days or five days to transmit the payment... you just have to assume it's going to be five days or you're going to miss your settlement."
The reason for that uncertainty, he explains, is structural. Most cross-border payments made by banks still travel via the SWIFT Network, a chain of correspondent banks passing money from one to the next.
He says:
"Although it’s improved recently, with the most recent iterations of SWIFT messaging for very popular payment corridors, it can now be same-day under good circumstances.
"But in a lot of cases, you could still be looking at somewhere in the two-to-five-day range."
New research from the cross-border payments firm found 60% of exporting SMEs say they will be unable to meet demand from their international customers without access to cost-effective cross-border payments, while 32% think poor payment infrastructure leads to increased cart abandonment.
Geopolitics is compounding the problem; the report found 28% of businesses surveyed admit that recent uncertainty has meant they've had to pass increased costs on to customers by raising prices, and 31% say unpredictable tariffs have caused major disruption to their supply chain.
Currenxie's model, Sam says, avoids that chain almost entirely by holding accounts with local banks in markets around the world, connected directly into local settlement systems like Pay: UK's Faster Payments, for instance.
"We would take pounds from them in the UK through Faster Payments, and then we would send it through the Philippines' equivalent system, their local settlement system... effectively instantaneously, the same day," he explains.
Beyond the obvious speed and cost benefits, Sam argues the real prize is certainty.
"You know, okay, I have T+30, I can pay on day 30 because it's going to go through the local payment system," he continues.
Asked how a payments provider can help businesses weather geopolitical shocks like tariffs, conflict and shipping disruption, Sam is careful not to overstate what any single tool can do.
"We're just one piece of a very big and complex puzzle, " he notes. "We can't solve everything for every business."
He points to diversification as the underlying strategy businesses are increasingly leaning on.
"If you have a supplier in one country or one region of the world, ideally you'd have two, three, four, five suppliers spread across different regions of the world. Same for a customer base," he says. "It's just basic diversification for resilience."
Currenxie's role, he says, is removing friction from that process, issuing virtual local bank accounts "within minutes" so a business can pay and be paid in a new market without opening 10 different bank accounts and wading through the paperwork that comes with each one.
He says the strategy is paying off for those already doing it: in Currenxie's own surveys this year, businesses that had diversified both sourcing and sales into more countries reported: "almost uniformly [greater than 90%] driven greater profitability for them."
That aligns with wider industry data: 2026 trade research found SMEs are increasing supplier diversification, expanding global sourcing to countries such as Canada, India, Japan and Australia, as global conflicts overtook tariffs, inflation and interest rates to become the dominant macroeconomic concern for importers and exporters in 2026.
If predictability is the underappreciated problem, foreign exchange fees are the one businesses actively misunderstand, according to Sam, and it's costing them.
He breaks currency conversion pricing into three models:
Common with high-street bureaux de change is an "all-in rate" where the fee is baked invisibly into the exchange rate offered.
This is "really common in corporate FX" – a headline fee plus a hidden spread.
"That might be half a per cent... but there will be a spread as well. So, there might be an additional 0.3% to 0.5% baked into the spread," he explains.
Unless a business checks the live mid-market rate independently, he says, "you'll never know what you're really being charged."
Mid-market rate plus a transparent, explicit fee is what Sam argues businesses should look for.
"Once you understand that, you can actually start to competitively benchmark and understand your costs," he says.
It matters for accounting too, he adds, since an explicit fee shows up as a clean expense line, whereas a spread "just disappears, basically".
Third-party research backs up the scale of this. Some cross-border payments can cost up to 10 times as much as local payments, according to the Bank of England, and total costs on some corridors run above 3%, even before smaller retail-style transfers, which still average around 6% in fees.
One recent industry analysis found UK SMEs lost an average of around £53,000 each to currency volatility during 2024–25 – a figure that puts Sam's warnings about fees "nibbling away at your margins" in sharp focus.
"It's very beneficial if you have an account in the US," he says of a UK business selling to American customers, even though opening a US bank account directly isn't practical for most small firms. A virtual local account from a payments provider "does the same thing".
This is where Sam says the biggest, least-visible losses happen, especially for online sellers using processors like Stripe or PayPal.
If a UK business only holds a GBP account, a US processor will convert dollars to pounds before sending the money over at, in Sam's words, "never... favourable rates.”
Routing payouts into a local-currency account instead avoids the conversion altogether. "That can be a 3% saving right there," he says.
"Understand FX markups... so that you can actually compare and understand your true cost," Sam says. This message also underpins his first two tips.
