Selling into new countries can unlock growth, but it also means dealing with different payment schemes, different rules, and a different risk profile in each market.
Cross-border payments sit behind a huge amount of online growth, but they’re still easy to talk about in vague terms.
‘Going international’ can sound like a routing problem and a couple of new payment methods, when in reality it changes the day-to-day mechanics of how a business gets authorised, gets paid, manages chargebacks and meets local expectations at checkout.
Each market brings its own schemes, its own operating rules, and its own patterns of fraud, and those details are usually where performance is won or lost. That gap between the headline idea of expansion and the operational reality is what our latest Payments Power 50 episode set out to address.
Host Mark Walker (editorial director at The Fintech Times) is joined by Victor Padee (CRO, Aevi), Tom Voaden (VP commercial, BR-DGE) and David Messenger (global CEO, Ping Pong Payments) to discuss what merchants and payments teams run into when they start selling internationally, and what tends to make the difference in practice.
The discussion splits B2C from B2B. For B2C, it’s mostly about getting payments approved and keeping checkout running smoothly. For B2B, the stakes are higher – bigger values, tighter checks, and far less room for settlement to go wrong – which changes how companies think about providers and routing.
On what’s next, they touch on agentic commerce, stablecoins, and further fintech consolidation: but the tone stays grounded: the winners will be the ones that perform under live volume, market by market.
