July 31, 2026
Banks are slow to onboard startups, quick to reject them, and expensive to pay through, so the fastest-growing companies are quietly walking away. Read on what triggered the shift, and how a PSP multi-currency account keeps a startup's money moving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
European small businesses feel it directly: 53% name high transaction costs their biggest cross-border pain point, ahead of poor transparency and unpredictable FX.
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.
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.
The scale of the move is now documented:
The segment that is leaving is also the fastest-growing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Open your multi-currency account →
The contrast, drawn from the evidence above, explains the switch.
Banks still initiate most cross-border B2B payments, handling around 73% of volumes overall and 76% in the large-corporate segment, according to Visa.
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.
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.
Open your multi-currency account →
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.
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