фото показано с : invezz.com

For a vast majority of finance teams, their payment stack is something that gets assembled piece by piece over time (say a provider for domestic transfers here, another for cross-border payouts there, a third for FX).

And while all of this is fine, by the time the cracks become visible, the operational cost of holding everything together becomes extremely inflated.

In this regard, PwC researchers found that finance teams today spend roughly 30% of their time on manual reconciliation, a figure that can alone give most CFOs a moment for pause.

But the downstream costs go further as McKinsey studies estimate that companies lose upwards of 5% of annual revenue to payment processing inefficiencies, a number that compounds quickly for businesses operating across multiple currencies and regions. 

Similarly, UK regulators have documented more than 800 hours of unplanned outages at major financial institutions over two years, a reminder that fragmented infrastructure doesn't just slow things down; at critical moments, it can bring operations to a complete stop.

In all of this, the underlying problem isn't any single provider but the model in place, which runs separate integrations with different settlement timings, different file formats, and different dashboards means treasury teams are constantly stitching together a cash position from incomplete data. 

For instance, a marketplace processing 50,000 monthly payouts across three different providers can lose more than 15 hours every month just standardising that data into a workable format (all of this is before any actual analysis is done). 

The visibility problem runs parallel to the reconciliation one because without a unified, real-time view of balances across currencies and accounts, liquidity management becomes reactive rather than planned.

Cash sitting idle in one account while another runs short does not spell out a treasury strategy but rather a reflection of an infrastructure that wasn't designed with coordination in mind.

Regulatory complexity adds another layer of madness to all of this, as businesses expanding across borders don't just inherit new payment rails but new compliance requirements as well.

And managing those requirements across multiple providers grows non-linearly. 

To help address these bottlenecks, projects like OpenPayd have devised a setup that affords digital businesses across multiple markets and asset classes to operate seamlessly.

The platform’s infrastructure connects traditional payment rails (be it SEPA, Faster Payments, SWIFT, local ACH systems) with digital asset capabilities through a single API, thus eliminating the need to manage separate providers for fiat and crypto operations.

Furthermore, OpenPayd’s virtual IBAN architecture assigns unique transaction identifiers to incoming payments, enabling automatic matching without the spreadsheet dependency that defines so many finance team workflows.

For businesses running high volumes of inbound and outbound payments (i.e., payroll providers, remittance platforms, marketplaces, online brokerages), the operational difference is material.

Also, from a purely numbers standpoint, the platform currently processes $180 billion in annualised transaction volume across more than 1,000 clients and 5 million connected accounts, with reported uptime of 99.99%.

Its client list includes Kraken, Ripple, Bitfinex, OKX, and Wirex, all of whom are companies that operate in environments where payment reliability is not negotiable, and downtime carries real financial consequences.

For treasury teams too, OpenPayd’s multi-currency account structure provides real-time visibility across balances via a single dashboard, replacing the multi-login, multi-spreadsheet workflow that's standard under a fragmented setup.

FX is handled transparently through the same interface, with rates that reflect the actual cost of conversion rather than a margin embedded across multiple transactions. 

Lastly, it bears mentioning that the platform holds regulatory licenses across multiple jurisdictions, including the UK FCA, Malta MFSA, and Canadian FIN-TRAC, which matters for clients that need payment infrastructure capable of following them into new markets without requiring separate regulatory relationships in each one.

The more recent direction of OpenPayd's product development tracks closely with a broader shift in enterprise payments.

To elaborate, with cross-border payment values projected to exceed $250 trillion by 2027 according to the Bank of England, and average global remittance costs still running above 6% per World Bank data, stablecoins have moved from a crypto-adjacent experiment to a legitimate operational tool for treasury teams focused on reducing settlement times and corridor costs.

Within all of this, OpenPayd has positioned stablecoin payouts as an enterprise-grade capability rather than a supplementary feature, building a rail-agnostic architecture that routes transactions across fiat, alternative, or blockchain rails based on cost and speed at the time of execution.

Since compliance is embedded directly in its payout flow, processes such as sanctions screening, chain analytics, etc are aligned with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which came into effect for crypto-asset service providers over a year ago. 

Lastly, the company has also achieved PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 20000-1, and ISO 14001 certifications, ensuring enterprise-grade security.

Therefore, looking ahead, it stands to reason that companies that adopt OpenPayd’s playbook can potentially move faster and expand into new rails and markets without rebuilding their stack each time. 

The ones that don't stand to spend a third of their finance team's week making spreadsheets agree with each other. In any case, interesting times ahead!

The post Payment infra is a strategic decision: why most firms are getting it wrong appeared first on Invezz

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