Expanding a business across borders should be about seizing new opportunities and growth in key revenue drivers. Yet for many companies every new market means a new currency account, a new bank relationship and another round of compliance checks that can take weeks or months to complete. The result is a fragmented financial operation that slows growth and erodes profitability before the first sale is made.

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Today we break down what goes into the price of cross-border payments, and which of those costs a business can avoid.

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What Actually Makes a Cross-Border Payment Expensive

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The price of a cross-border payment included:

• the visible bank transfer fee;
• the margin baked into the exchange rate;
• and the cut taken by every bank the payment passes through on its way to the recipient. 

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The last part is where most of the cost hides.

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Inside SEPA a euro transfer costs the same as a domestic one, often just a few cents. Europe and Central Asia together form the cheapest region in the world for cross-border payments, averaging 1% to 1.9% of value. Step outside that zone and the cost jumps.

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Back in 2023 sending €5,000 from the EU to a non-SEPA economy cost around 12 times more than the same transfer inside the EU, rising to 15 times more at €20,000. The cause was structural: payments left the shared European rails and entered the SWIFT correspondent banking network, where several intermediary banks each took a cut. 

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The fix proves the point: when Montenegro joined SEPA in October 2025, the average business transfer fell from €73.40 to €6.15.

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For the markets a European company actually expands into, little has changed. The Financial Stability Board's 2025 report finds cross-border costs have stayed flat since 2023, with business payments across much of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America often exceeding 3% of the transfer, and payments in sub-Saharan Africa averaging 3.1% to 3.5%. Most of that cost hides in the exchange rate rather than the visible fee.

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The route is the other half of the story. Over 60% of wholesale payments still pass through one or more intermediary banks, each adding time and taking a cut, per Federal Reserve data. Banks remain the most expensive path, at close to 15% on smaller transfers against about 3.5% for digital-first providers, per World Bank data. 

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For a European company making €500,000 of international payments into markets outside Europe each year, an all-in cost above 3% means more than €15,000 lost to fees and FX margins annually, and more when payments are routed through several intermediaries.

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How a Multi-Currency Account Changes the Game

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One practical way to cut costs is to open a multi-currency account, which lets you convert less in the first place.

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Better still, run it at a payment service provider (PSP) rather than a bank: McKinsey finds non-bank providers often charge about 20% of what traditional banks do on lower-value cross-border payments.

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COLIBRIX ONE multi-currency accounts let a business hold balances in the currencies it trades in, so it can receive, hold and pay in the same currency instead of converting on the way in and again on the way out.

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Open your multi-currency account →

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But the account is a lever, not a cure. Opening a single multi-currency account does not on its own remove correspondent banking. Any provider relies on correspondent banks for certain currencies and corridors. And a company can hold separate USD, EUR and GBP accounts and still reach recipients over efficient local rails, settling quickly and cheaply wherever those rails exist.

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What actually moves the rest of the cost is the route each payment takes: how many intermediaries it passes through, whether a direct or local rail exists for that currency pair and how the FX leg is priced. Two businesses with the same multi-currency account can pay very different amounts depending on how their payments are routed.

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Where the Real Savings Come From: Payment Routing

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For most payments there is more than one way to reach the recipient, and those paths differ in both cost and speed. A payment can travel a long correspondent chain with several deductions, or take a shorter path over a local or direct rail where one is available for that currency and destination.

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COLIBRIX ONE selects the route for each payment rather than defaulting to a single fixed chain. The aim is the path that is efficient on both price and speed: using local rails where they exist, keeping the number of intermediary hops as low as the corridor allows, and pricing the FX leg transparently. Where correspondent banking is genuinely the only option for a currency or destination, the route is chosen to minimise the cost and delay that chain adds.

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The multi-currency business account sits on top of this. Holding balances in the currencies you actually trade in means fewer forced conversions, and the option to hold a currency until conditions are favourable rather than converting on every transaction. Consolidating relationships into one account also removes duplicated onboarding and reconciliation.

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One international group that consolidated its relationships at COLIBRIX ONE cut its cross-border payment servicing costs by close to 30% and recovered internal time lost to reconciliation and duplicated compliance. 

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Open your multi-currency account →

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For smaller firms the reported gains can be larger: SMEs can access savings of up to 61% on foreign-exchange payments against traditional providers. These are third-party figures, and the outcome in any given case depends on the corridors, currencies and volumes involved.

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The common thread is routing and consolidation, not the label on the account.