With international expansion coming earlier and earlier in a business’ growth strategy, Vivien Cheung, Senior Director of Strategic Banking Partnerships at Airwallex, explains how a business can localise its financial operations in a new market, without rebuilding them every time.
The expansion plan is ready: pricing, hiring, a launch date. Then the first payment doesn’t arrive.
The payer’s system had taken one look at the account details and flagged them with an error. That’s where the borders turn up. Not at a checkpoint, but in a payment system that doesn’t recognise the account.
Europe may appear like one market to a multinational business planning its next move, and it’s also why the gaps are so easy to miss. Banking arrangements, payment habits and regulators’ expectations still differ country by country. A failed payment is only the visible symptom, behind it sit accounts, entities and currencies that don’t necessarily line up.
I’ve supported customers through various market launches, and this pattern is consistent. Businesses spend months perfecting their entry and almost no time on what happens next. The EU’s single market opens the door to European trade, but it doesn’t do the operational work. As AI agents take on more of the finance function, that gap will only widen.
Localising to reuse not rebuild
The finance stack needs to ensure customers can pay the way they expect, suppliers can be paid without friction, and finance teams can see it all in one place.
In the Netherlands, an Airwallex customer can have a local Dutch IBAN, access to SEPA credit transfers, instant payments and direct debits, payment through iDEAL or Wero, a locally issued card and one view across every entity and currency. Each removes a small point of friction. Together, they separate a business that looks local from one that only sells there. Local regulation matters just as much. Every country has its own regulator with its own expectations, and it’s far better to learn them before you arrive than after. But tackle each one in isolation and localisation becomes fragmentation, with every country ending up as its own product.
A small business doesn’t need to become a specialist in local banking and regulation just because it scaled internationally. The goal instead should be to work from a core system that can be reused in each new market, then decide deliberately where to localise on top of it.
Connected systems are a growth decision
Every new market can add another account, another provider, and another set of records. When those systems don’t talk to each other, finance teams reconcile manually, and a failure can take days to trace back to its source. IMF research notes that Europe’s retail payments systems remain largely segmented even within national borders, which can impede small firms’ ability to scale beyond their home market.
At Airwallex, we chose to build our own infrastructure, acquiring 85+ licenses over a decade, which our founder and CEO, Jack Zhang, calls the ‘Path of Max Resistance’. It may have taken us longer to start, but it made sense in the long-run to build the core foundations that run global payments. Businesses want their financial operations to run on one system, with money moving reliably and instantly, which is much harder to guarantee across a chain of providers’ and their fragmented systems.
Now that our core infrastructure rails are in place, we are adding the global intelligence layer on top. The focus for each new market is about localising, not rebuilding. Localising doesn’t mean going it alone: the right partners still give us the local reach and the trust that every new market demands.
Readiness is organisational
The technology stack is the obvious place to start when asking whether you’re ready for the next market. Experience has taught me to check something less exciting: whether your teams are aligned behind one goal and know who is accountable for delivering it.
Expansion is one of the most cross-functional things a company will do. Product, finance, legal, compliance and operations all depend on each other, and one blocked workstream soon holds up three others. Three questions are worth stress-testing before launch. Does the end-to-end experience feel like one product? Is it clear what is strategically important to control? And who can make the final call when workstreams collide?
One of my biggest learnings is to invest in project management before it’s needed, and to give the team the mandate and seniority to drive decisions, not just track them. A ten-person business won’t have a project team, but it can name one person with that authority and a clear route to escalate. Each launch should leave behind processes the next one can reuse.
Agents raise the stakes
AI agents don’t change the fundamentals of expansion, they raise the stakes. When payments and financial decisions happen at agentic speed, the gaps a human team could work around become failures. A finance manager can step in and fix a problem manually, but an agent can’t. If your payments depend on several third parties, it inherits every handoff, delay, and dependency.
Knowing who controls the core infrastructure, such as how money moves and how risk and compliance are managed, is critical. It decides whether or not agents run on one consistent system. The model that works is one where people set the objectives and rules, and agents act within them. These foundations will determine if a business can keep up.
There is a significant opportunity for small businesses as agents make it easier to operate internationally, and I’m confident the businesses that win will be the ones whose infrastructure was built to support that from the start. At Airwallex, our goal is to give small businesses access to the sophisticated infrastructure of a global company, wherever their home market or whatever their headcount.
The expansion plan is the easy part. What decides whether that first payment arrives is the infrastructure underneath it.
The post Europe’s single market still has borders appeared first on The Fintech Times.
