What A/R Teams Actually Need From International Payment Gateways

Why Most International Payment Gateways Fail A/R Teams 

Key insight: In a recent policy paper that considered global financial market trends, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) asserted that “[c]ross-border payments (XBP), particularly remittances and retail transactions, remain more costly, slower, less accessible, and less transparent than domestic payments.”

Most international payment gateways are designed to process payments, not manage receivables. But before those incoming funds can become the working capital necessary to operate and grow your business, your A/R team must still address the challenges of applying, reconciling, and managing those payments.

In many cases, these checkout-optimized payment gateways are inadequately prepared for:

• Variances in records and data formats across regions, banks, and payment methods
• Reconciliation challenges caused by currency conversion
• Multi-entity structures with diverse, localized back-office systems
• Increased government oversight from an expanding number of parties and territories
• Scalability demands from global growth

A poorly-chosen payment gateway—and accompanying A/R strategy—can dramatically undermine the success rate and overall timelines of your cross-border transactions. So, you’d be wise to choose a more “receivables-ready” platform.

Key takeaway: A checkout-optimized gateway that focuses exclusively on collecting payments leaves your A/R team with the real work: figuring out who paid, what they paid for, and where it belongs.

What Does an A/R Team Actually Need From an International Payment Gateway?

Your payment gateway represents a single—but central—piece in your broader accounts receivable puzzle, which means that when you choose it, you need to make sure that it properly fits within your business. If you exclusively consider your payment or e-commerce requirements, you’ll find yourself inadvertently sabotaging other areas, such as cash application or reporting. And any benefits you capture will be offset by these emerging inefficiencies and errors.

So, if you’d like to ensure that your billing and payment efforts can adequately scale as you take your business international, you’ll want to opt for a receivables-ready gateway and supplemental A/R automation platform that can deliver:

#1: Local Payment Methods and Local Acquiring

No one wants to be forced into using an unfamiliar or confusing payment experience. But if you only accept a handful of credit card or wire transfer options, you’ll be asking your customers to gamble their funds on the reliability and performance of an unknown process. Instead, embrace a payment strategy that leverages local acquiring.

Simply put, local acquiring describes a payment processing method where the merchant bank or acquirer (the financial institution that accepts card payments from buyers on your behalf) is located in the same country or territory as the customer. And since the transaction is now occurring in the same region as the issuer (the customer’s bank), you can expect lower processing costs and far fewer opportunities for any confusion or authorization challenges to arise. So, even if you don’t have a physical presence in a specific territory, with the right payment network, you can behave as if you do.

This approach will prove critical as you scale into new countries since payment differences between nations extend far beyond currencies. You’ll need to accommodate localized payment types as well. For instance, if you expand into the European continent, you’ll likely need to coordinate with the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) for pay-by-bank, while in Brazil, you’ll want to support Pix. Similarly, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is active in India, and the remainder of the Asia-Pacific region leverages other national real-time payment rails. And these channels only seem to be growing.

In fact, The Clearing House’s Q4 2025 RTP network data showed a 28% year-over-year increase in transaction volume and a 405% increase in transaction value, compared with Q4 2024. So, by embracing both local payment methods and local acquiring, you’ll be in a much more stable position for future growth.

Key takeaway: If your gateway can’t accept how a market pays, your A/R hassles start before the invoice is even drafted.

#2: Structured Remittance Data

A remittance advice is an explanatory document sent by the buyer that accompanies an incoming payment and provides supplementary details regarding the transaction. Perhaps the funds cover multiple invoices, or the customer sent a short payment because part of the delivery was damaged or under dispute. With well-structured, accurate remittance data, cash application—matching these arriving funds to their appropriate accounts and balances—becomes much easier.

“Without clear remittance data, incoming payments become unidentified deposits sitting in your bank account. While physical cash is deposited, it remains unapplied on your A/R sub-ledger.
This creates immediate operational bottlenecks: customer credit limits remain artificially blocked, your Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) appears inflated, and your collections team may mistakenly chase customers for invoices that have already been paid.”

This wasted time and labor can quickly eat into the efficiency of your accounts receivable. In fact, in a 2025 survey of A/R teams, the Financial Education & Research Foundation (FERF) found that 60% of respondents identified delayed or missing remittance details as their leading pain point.

Cross-border transactions only make matters worse. Remittance formats can vary wildly between countries or even banks, with pertinent details left out or never captured. Just consider the variability of date formats used across North America (MM/DD/YYYY), Europe (DD/MM/YY), and Asia (YYYY/MM/DD). And if your payment gateway and A/R automation solution isn’t smart enough to rationalize across these varying structures, your staff will have to be.

Fortunately, more than 70 countries have embraced the ISO 20022 standard, which was created by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and outlines what data and metadata should be transmitted in a given remittance advice. With this richer, structured payment data at hand, automated matching becomes much more viable.

So, as you search for the best international payment gateway for your business, prioritize ones that not only support ISO 20022 but that can readily digest and comprehend other formats as well. Ideally, your solution will accurately pull in structured remittance data through an open application programming interface (API), keeping these details intact and easily understandable for your automation efforts.

Key takeaway: A payment you can’t identify isn’t collected cash. It’s a scavenger hunt.

#3: Presentment vs. Settlement Currency (and Transparent FX)

For cross-border payments, presentment and settlement currencies rarely align, and foreign exchange (FX) rate fluctuations or intermediary wire fees inevitably cause the deposited cash amount to differ from the open invoice total.

In a payment, the presentment currency refers to the legal tender of the buyer, specifically, the currency they are billed in and which they use to pay. By contrast, the settlement currency will reflect the monetary system of the seller, identifying the currency used when the payment is deposited in their merchant bank account.

For an international sale, at some point, the presentment currency will need to be converted to the settlement currency within the foreign exchange (FX) market. As such, the final total deposited in the seller’s bank account will rarely match the amount recorded on the initial invoice, as relevant processing fees and variable exchange rates come into play. A receivables-ready platform doesn’t just treat this delta as a short payment or force staff to manually balance the books. Instead, it automatically reconciles the transaction by writing off bank fees to a designated Processing Fee Expense account and booking currency fluctuations directly to Realized FX Gain/Loss in your ERP. This maintains strict double-entry integrity while eliminating manual journal entries.

At the same time, you’d be wise to opt for an offering that can transparently communicate FX details and costs to both the buyer and seller rather than hiding them behind an opaque processing or payment gateway fee. And if you hope to seamlessly scale into new markets, you’ll also want to prioritize a system that can adjust to new currencies with ease. For example, our Accounts Receivable Automation platform, by leaning on the Flywire global payment network, can natively support transactions across 140 different global currencies across 240 countries and territories.

Key takeaway: Multi-currency support means billing, settling, and reconciling across currencies—not just displaying a different symbol at checkout.

#4: Reconciliation and Cash Application Automation

The gold standard for the modern invoice-to-cash (I2C) cycle, straight-through processing (STP) describes an A/R infrastructure that can automatically handle incoming payments from receipt to posting—no help needed. Without involving any of your staff, an STP-enabled system can capture payment and remittance data, apply those funds to the appropriate accounts and invoices, and update your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting systems.

As we’ve already outlined, when currencies and remittance formats vary by region, cash application and broader account reconciliation can become rather complicated. Using a more traditional or manual method, you’ll need to set aside staff to sort through relevant spreadsheets, databases, ordering systems, physical records, and any other potential streams for each transaction.

Or you could embrace STP, opting for an automation strategy that can account for these variances and avoid unnecessary payment bottlenecks. Many businesses, in turn, have begun to rely on artificial intelligence (AI) in their ERP systems, leveraging the technology to interpret and rationalize disparate, incomplete, and even conflicting data without direct human input.

For example, within the Invoiced by Flywire platform, we offer both a CashMatch AI and a Remittance Advice AI that together ensure that any incoming funds—even if tied to a foreign currency, short payment, or multi-invoice payment—are accurately applied to the appropriate accounts, invoices, and balances in a matter of seconds. And when you have access to real-time data across your financials, you’re better positioned to incorporate predictive analytics into your A/R.

This STP- and AI-based approach can readily absorb global growth, as your cash application and reconciliation efforts are no longer tied to direct labor and now simply rely on adequate processing power.

Key takeaway: Reconciliation is often the first thing to break at a global scale. But automating your cash application will keep your close times steady as you enter new markets.

#5: ERP and Systems Integration Across Entities

In a survey of more than 250 financial professionals, Flywire found that businesses actively engaged in global sales reported more per-transaction challenges—sometimes twice as many—as their domestically-focused peers. Much of this friction was attributed to poor ERP integration, with 89% of respondents indicating that they would save money if they could more tightly integrate their cross-border receivables process with their ERP.

Of course, these business systems are rarely designed with cross-border payments processing  in mind. For that, you’ll need a robust invoice-to-cash automation strategy built around a flexible A/R platform along with payment gateway integration that can translate between currencies and data formats seamlessly, updating your entire back office with accurate, timely information.

Prioritize real-time data integration over batch processing. Look for an option that will actively update your records for reconciliation instead of simply providing you with a report and leaving the hard part to your staff. The right choice will keep every stakeholder and every system on the same page, even if they exist on different continents.

Key takeaway: A gateway that can’t post to your ERP hasn’t reduced your workload. It’s simply been relocated to a spreadsheet.

#6: Compliance, Security, and Data Residency

When it comes to successful A/R, instituting robust security measures is equally important—if not more so—as building efficiency into your I2C workflows. Fraud and other criminal malfeasance will not only eat through whatever profit you may collect, but they can also easily destroy your reputation with customers and leave you susceptible to regulatory penalties.

To protect consumers, most national, regional, and even local governments have enacted legislation that establishes minimum security thresholds across multiple attack vectors. Anti-money laundering regulations commonly require complex know your customer (KYC) policies to be in place for financial institutions and related industries. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe establishes clear data residency standards for customers’ personal and financial information. 

Alongside government policies, industry groups and financial networks also commonly enact their own guidelines. For instance, if you hope to accept credit card payments from any of the major providers, you’ll need to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), likely opting for a tokenization strategy that avoids storing direct buyer financial data on your servers.

With the rise of generative AI, deepfakes, and similar tools, the fraud risk tied to cross-border payments has never been greater. In fact, the Deloitte Center for Financial Services anticipates that U.S. fraud losses will exceed $40 billion by 2027. And if you’re going to successfully navigate this minefield of potential risk, you’ll want a gateway and A/R platform able to produce fully compliant invoice and payment records for every transaction in every market.

Key takeaway: When it comes to the security of your global A/R stack, don’t let your payment gateway be the weakest link.

International Payment Gateways Broken Down

From this summary, the advantages of a receivables-ready gateway and A/R solution, like Invoiced by Flywire, become quickly apparent. Adding new territories, currencies, and payment types can be done in days rather than weeks. Data moves seamlessly between systems with zero effort. Cash application happens in the moment, stabilizing and accelerating cash flows. And reconciliation is handled automatically on the same day rather than as part of a labor-intensive, month-end closing.

How Will International Payment Gateways Change for A/R Teams? 

Much has changed within the payment space over the past few years, and going forward, you can expect only further disruptions. Some likely shifts will center around:

• Agentic AI: As algorithms grow more mature and specialized, agentic AI will dominate the A/R space, resolving more and more process and payment exceptions autonomously.
• ISO20022: With over 70 countries having embraced this standard already, expect to see more territories mandating automated cross-border payment matching.
• Digital currencies: While the cost-saving potential of stablecoin and central bank digital currency (CBDC) settlement rails has not yet been fully realized, innovators are aggressively pursuing the next breakthrough.
• Real-time regulatory transparency: E-invoicing and associated reporting mandates continue to push forward, demanding transaction-level visibility for tax authorities in more territories.
• Payment orchestration: Rather than relying on a single payment gateway, businesses will embrace orchestration platforms able to centralize and integrate multiple gateways, payment processors, acquirers, and other financial service providers.

Of course, the future is never certain, and any of these expected trends could easily be subverted by an innovation, regulatory trend, or revolutionary startup. To address this uncertainty, we recommend that you embrace strategies and platforms that offer sufficient flexibility to adapt to shifts in your customers, your markets, and your business.

Why Invoiced by Flywire Is Your Ideal Global A/R Solution

When it comes to global growth, there are few, if any, platforms that will prepare your billing and payment processes as well as Invoiced by Flywire’s Accounts Receivable Automation software. We deliver out-of-the-box integration with thousands of ERP, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and business systems. And our CashMatch AI and Remittance Advice AI make reconciliation a breeze as they parse through and rationalize incoming payment details across multiple documents, ensuring that incoming funds show up where they’re supposed to in mere seconds.

Thanks to the global payment capabilities of Flywire software, Invoiced can now accommodate cross-border transactions in over 140 currencies, complying with the tax withholding, regulatory reporting, and data security standards of 240 countries and territories. Meanwhile, the Flywire global payment network offers partners in each of these regions, allowing you to embrace local payment methods and acquiring.

See a real-life example of how straightforward your reconciliation for cross-border payments can be by scheduling a demo today.