B2B cross-border payments are losing their stickiness, and fintechs are capitalising on it

A £10,000 transfer gave Wise its founding idea: match payments on either side of a border, and avoid moving the money across it. At Sibos in Miami, Wise Platform’s Mike Robertson and Mastercard’s Johan Gerber discussed how that principle is reshaping cross-border payments

Kristo Käärmann’s cross-border payments education cost him about £500. Working in London for Deloitte, he moved a £10,000 Christmas bonus to his Estonian account, where interest rates were higher. When the money arrived, about £500 was missing. His bank had charged a £15 fee and used an exchange rate roughly five per cent worse than the one he had checked.

Käärmann’s friend Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, was also living in London but was paid in Estonia. They worked out a simple arrangement. Whenever Käärmann needed money in Estonia, he paid pounds into Hinrikus’s British account. Hinrikus sent the equivalent from his Estonian account to Käärmann’s. They used the exchange rate published by Reuters or Bloomberg, and the money never had to cross a border.

“We thought that if we could do it between ourselves, it should be possible between others as well,” Käärmann told the Estonian business newspaper Äripäev in 2013. The pair began building the service in 2010. TransferWise, as it was then called, opened to the public in 2011.

Fifteen years on, Wise has turned that private arrangement into an international payments network. Wise collects the money locally in one country and pays it out locally in another. As the company explained in a 2022 blog post, “money doesn’t really cross borders”.

“The customer doesn’t really care about the back end of it,” said Mike Robertson, Managing Director for North America at Wise Platform. “They just want the outcome.”

Five per cent under the radar

Käärmann had to check his exchange rate to discover where his £500 had gone. Banks could once count on most customers not bothering to check. These days, more of them do.

Mastercard’s Money in Motion report, compiled by Bain & Company and published on 23 September, found that 91 per cent of internationally active SMEs plan to switch cross-border payment provider within the next two years. And 92 per cent already use more than one.

Trust came top in Mastercard’s survey, cited by 35 per cent of respondents, just ahead of speed at 34 per cent. Cost and transparency followed, both at 28 per cent.

Domestic payments have raised expectations. People are used to money arriving almost immediately at home, Robertson said, and increasingly expect the same across borders.

For banks, the numbers are an uncomfortable read. Having a company’s main account doesn’t guarantee it will keep its international payments business.

Wise’s speed depends on direct access to local payment systems

Robertson said almost 80 per cent of Wise transactions settle within 20 seconds. The company’s quarterly mission update puts the figure at 77 per cent for April to June 2026.

He credited the speed to “being linked into the world’s local clearing systems”. The founders’ arrangement still describes the basic idea. Instead of routing every payment through intermediaries, Wise uses local accounts and payment systems to collect money on one side and pay it out on the other.

The Bank of England confirmed in 2018 that TransferWise had become the first non-bank payment service provider to join the UK’s Faster Payments system directly.

“How fast can you build a direct network?” Robertson said. “Cut out as many of the intermediaries as you can, take the cost out of that, keep it simple.”

The wider industry has some catching up to do. In its October 2025 progress report, the Financial Stability Board warned that the G20 was unlikely to meet its 2027 targets for improving cross-border payments worldwide. Governments and regulators had made progress on the rules, but cost and transparency had barely improved for end users.

As Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, put it: “The first and last mile of a cross-border payment depend on domestic payment rails.”

The banks have let Wise in

In February 2015, TransferWise sent demonstrators around Bank station in motorised bathtubs, dressed them in bathrobes and scattered some 6,000 blue rubber ducks in a campaign to clean up hidden banking fees.

Now banks including Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered use Wise’s network through Wise Platform. The rubber ducks have apparently been forgiven.

Robertson explained the division of labour. “Banks own the client relationship, the customer relationship, and they own the trust that goes with that,” he said. “Fintechs are probably better at the speed end of these things and the agility that goes behind that.”

Mastercard keeps its options open

Johan Gerber, Executive Vice President of Payment Networks at Mastercard, said the company has “always believed in the multi-rail, multi-money environment.” In August, the company completed its acquisition of BVNK, the UK stablecoin infrastructure firm. The deal, announced in March, was valued at up to $1.8 billion, including $300 million in contingent payments.

Gerber described an orchestration layer that would take the customer’s instruction and find the cheapest, most efficient way to carry it out. “So as long as we can receive the instruction of what it is I’m trying to do, then we can find the cheapest, most efficient path,” he said.
That route might involve a stablecoin, a domestic instant payment scheme, or an established banking network. Gerber said the orchestration layer would handle the choice “so the customer doesn’t have to worry about it”.

The original swap ran on trust between two friends

Käärmann and Hinrikus only had to trust each other. Scaling the arrangement to millions of customers required safeguards and a way to fix things when payments went wrong.

“Trust has to transfer into these broader and new mechanisms of how we move money faster,” Gerber said. It matters, he added, because “it’s not only when things are going well, it’s also what happens when things are not going well”.

Robertson put it more simply: “Fast doesn’t have to be unsafe.”

If a payment goes missing or a provider lets them down, businesses have alternatives.

The original swap also depended on access to accounts in both countries. Replicating it at scale means persuading regulators to let banks and non-bank providers connect to domestic payment systems.

“We need the regulators to set the rule book and allow both banks and non-bank APIs to play in that space correctly,” Robertson said.

Käärmann’s £500 was the cost of not knowing what he was paying. Businesses now have more ways to see the charges, and more providers ready to take their money.

Prefer to listen? The full conversation is also available as a podcast below.