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Nearly 30% of SMB's cross-border trade transactions now run through a specialist provider rather than a bank, according to Visa Consulting & Analytics. The businesses most exposed to slow, costly cross-border payments, startups and SMBs, are leading that shift.

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Growth depends on moving money constantly: paying suppliers and contractors abroad, running payroll across countries and collecting revenue in several currencies. European banking infrastructure is where that momentum stalls. It is why a growing share of founders now run their international business payments through a multi-currency account with a payment service provider instead of a traditional bank.

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In plain terms, what a payment service provider does is help a business move, accept and manage money across borders. The switch was not triggered by one event but by an accumulation of them.

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Slow to Onboard, Quick to Reject: The Wall Startups Hit First

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Europe presents itself as a single financial market, yet its banks still operate like national gatekeepers. The business federation Eurochambres documented in 2024 that companies face "significant difficulties" opening and maintaining an account in another member state, pointing to fragmented compliance, divergent AML frameworks and regulatory inconsistency as structural barriers.

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The caution is measurable. The European Central Bank's Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises consistently records SMBs reporting greater financing obstacles than large corporates, because smaller size is read as higher risk. Onboarding compounds it: KYC and AML review for a foreign-owned or multi-jurisdiction business can run for weeks or months, and for a company burning investor runway, that delay is expensive.

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Going International Quietly Costs a Startup Up to 4.5% per Payment

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The second problem surfaces the moment a startup builds for foreign markets, where it needs a genuine multi-currency business account and rarely gets a good one from a bank. Without direct rails, B2B cross-border payments fall back on correspondent banking, and each payment gets expensive in ways that are easy to miss:

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• 4.0%–4.5% in transaction and FX fees on the average cross-border payment, with funds taking three to five days to clear (Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, 2019).
• 0.7%–1.1% added as an FX margin by the receiving provider, on top of the headline fee (FSB).
• Fewer than 45% of B2B and B2P payments settle within one business day (FSB).

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European small businesses feel it directly: 53% name high transaction costs their biggest cross-border pain point, ahead of poor transparency and unpredictable FX.

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These numbers have faces. Romanian fashion designer Silvia Șerban told Mastercard and the Financial Times that cross-border payment problems forced her to stop taking international orders for three months in 2024, a serious setback for a small business with no finance team to absorb it.

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Where the Demand Went: Up to Half of SMBs Now Use a PSP

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Put the problems together — rejection, slow onboarding and the FX tax — and they describe a single unmet need: startups and SMBs want fast, cheap global business payments, and traditional banks are structurally unable to supply them. Unmet demand does not disappear, it gets served by a payment service provider.

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The scale of the move is now documented:

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• 23% of UK SMBs already use fintechs or other nonbank providers for cross-border payments, rising to 30% for micro-businesses (McKinsey Global Payments Report, 2024).
• 35%–50% of SMBs across North America, Europe and Emerging Asia used a fintech or nontraditional provider for cross-border payments in the 12 months before McKinsey's 2025 report.

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The segment that is leaving is also the fastest-growing.

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FXC Intelligence, via Mastercard: SMB cross-border payments are set to expand 54%, from $13.8 trillion in 2024 to $21.2 trillion by 2032.

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The customers most inclined to choose a PSP are the ones generating the most new volume, so the gap between banks and purpose-built providers is widening, not closing.

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The fit is structural. Startups and PSPs are both newer, more flexible and less bureaucratic than incumbent banks, and both are built around growth. Growth is where their incentives align: a PSP earns more as its client scales.

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Speed is part of the same story. Fintechs bring new products to market in two to six months against 12 to 18 months for incumbent banks (McKinsey, 2022). A traditional bank, meanwhile, has little commercial interest in one more early-stage account, where balances are small next to a large corporate client, so the relationship stays cautious.

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A second reason is specific to how startups are staffed. A young company has no treasury or finance department, just a small team that cannot spend its days reconciling statements across four banks or wiring up separate integrations for payments, payouts and billing. Without a finance hire, it still needs the essentials of treasury management: a single, real-time view of balances and flows across currencies.

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That calls for a turnkey financial platform with fast integration, not just a bank account. This is where a PSP such as COLIBRIX ONE fits the profile, consolidating acquiring, recurring billing and a multi-currency account with a dedicated IBAN into one relationship:

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• Acquiring: a licensed EU and UK platform and principal member of Visa and Mastercard, processing 12 million plus transactions a year across 130+ countries at roughly 90% approval rates, with local and global payment methods integrated in one to two business days.
• Multi-currency account: a true multi-currency account holding EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, PLN and more in one place, with a dedicated IBAN issued in your company name rather than a pooled or generic one, plus direct SWIFT access in EUR, USD and PLN within that single IBAN and SEPA instant payments.
• Recurring payments: a single API compatible with any billing model, accepting major payment methods across markets, with real-time analytics and unified acceptance across the US, UK and Europe, including Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• Speed and support: compliance verification completed within 48 hours, plus a dedicated account manager rather than a generic ticket queue.
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Open your multi-currency account →

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The contrast, drawn from the evidence above, explains the switch.

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Banks Still Run Most of B2B Payments, But the Share Is Shifting

Banks still initiate most cross-border B2B payments, handling around 73% of volumes overall and 76% in the large-corporate segment, according to Visa.

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The trajectory, though, runs one way. Businesses across European markets, from central Europe to the Nordics and CEE, consistently report that traditional banking services fall short of their needs and expect payments to be faster, cheaper and more transparent.

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Fintechs won the P2P market on precisely those terms, and they are now turning the same playbook on B2B, a far larger revenue pool, while building the capability to serve larger corporates too. For a scaling company, the advantages that matter day to day, onboarding speed, FX pricing and reconciliation, increasingly sit with the specialists.

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Open your multi-currency account →

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For a startup, the conclusion is straightforward. A bank treats the company as a risk to be contained; a payment service provider treats its growth as a shared interest. That difference, repeated across onboarding, cost, FX and support, is what moves founders off traditional banks first, and it is why the shift is proving durable.