Insights
By Jason Kumpf
You can have a great product and a strong market, and still leave money on the table at the final step. Getting paid smoothly in each new country is its own skill, and it rewards the companies that take it seriously.
In every market, customers have payment methods they trust and use by habit. Supporting those options, rather than forcing a single global method, removes the friction that causes abandoned carts. It is often the difference between a market that performs and one that disappoints.
Showing prices in the local currency, presenting the page in the local language, and avoiding unexpected fees all make buyers comfortable. Comfort at the moment of purchase turns directly into completed sales. These details look small from headquarters and feel large to the customer.
Collecting revenue abroad is only half the job. Planning early for how funds are repatriated, and doing it with good rates and clean reconciliation, protects your margins and keeps finance happy. The companies that plan this from the start avoid painful surprises later.
Getting paid well in every market is a competitive advantage. Offer trusted local methods, design checkout for conversion, and plan the flow of funds home, and entering new countries becomes far more rewarding.
For companies expanding abroad, the clearest growth story today is India and Asia. India’s digital economy reached around 402 billion dollars in 2025, roughly 11.7 percent of GDP, and is on track to reach a fifth of the economy by 2030 (Analytics Insight). Its instant-payment network, UPI, handles more than 20 billion transactions a month and about 84 percent of digital retail payments (BCG), while the country’s fintech market is projected to grow from about 156 billion dollars in 2025 toward 990 billion by 2032 (market forecast).
The momentum extends across the region. Cross-border UPI volume grew roughly twentyfold year over year as the network expanded across Asia (Analytics Insight). Companies that position for this now are stepping into the fastest-growing payments region on earth.
A new generation of fintech companies has built the infrastructure that makes this growth accessible. (CoinLaw). Valued around 9.2 (Business Standard). For a company reaching into high-growth markets, partnering with platforms like this is one of the most direct routes to capturing the opportunity.
Jason Kumpf has spent his career helping companies get paid, wherever their customers are. He is Head of US Revenue at Razorpay, a board advisor, angel investor, and speaker. More about Jason.
The most expensive payment problem is the one that never shows up in your reports: the customer who reached checkout, looked for a familiar way to pay, and left. The scale of it is documented. ACI Worldwide finds checkout conversion can rise by up to 30 percent when a business offers the methods a region prefers, and Stripe measured an average 12 percent revenue lift and 7.4 percent conversion gain from surfacing just one additional relevant local method. For a company expanding abroad, that is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a market that works and one that quietly underperforms.
Many companies assume that accepting major cards covers them globally. It does not. Local payment methods now account for more than 75 percent of worldwide e-commerce (industry data), and the leaders vary sharply by country. India runs on UPI, which processes over 12 billion transactions a month and more than three quarters of payment volume (The Paypers). China runs on Alipay and WeChat Pay. Brazil runs on Pix, much of Africa on mobile money and account-to-account transfers (G+D). A card-only checkout is, in much of the world, a closed door.
The rails themselves are shifting toward real time. Instant payment adoption grew roughly 42 percent year over year and is on track to make up nearly 28 percent of all electronic payments by 2027 (Finacle). For a business, faster settlement means better cash flow and often lower cost than legacy card processing. Advising a company on where and how to expand increasingly means advising it on which payment rails to support, because the wrong choice raises costs and slows the very cash the expansion was meant to generate.
The advisory takeaway is concrete. Map the dominant payment methods in each target market before you enter. Offer them, price in local currency, and connect to real-time and account-to-account rails where they exist. Choose a payments partner that can switch markets on without a rebuild, and design your settlement, FX, and reconciliation for many currencies from day one. Cross-border payments are a market measured in the hundreds of billions and growing (Fortune Business Insights). Treating them as core strategy, not back-office plumbing, is what lets an expanding company capture the revenue it is already so close to earning.
When two companies sell a similar product into a new market, the one that is easier to pay often wins. A checkout that feels native, in the local language, the local currency, and the local payment method, signals that a company is serious and permanent rather than a passing experiment. That impression compounds. It earns trust, repeat purchases, and word of mouth in markets where reputation travels fast. Payments, handled well, stop being a cost centre and become part of why customers choose you over a competitor who made buying harder.
The direction of travel is away from cards and toward direct, account-to-account transfers, often inside a wallet. A2A methods already represent roughly 30 percent of global point-of-sale volume, led by India, Brazil, and Nigeria (G+D). For an expanding business, A2A frequently means lower fees and faster settlement than card rails. Advisors who understand this can steer a client toward the methods that both convert better and cost less, rather than defaulting to the card-first habits of their home market.
The broader digital payments market is forecast to grow from around 170 billion dollars in 2025 toward roughly 790 billion by 2035, a compound rate above 16 percent (Precedence Research). Newer rails, including stablecoin settlement for cross-border business flows, are moving from experiment to serious consideration, a shift examined in McKinsey’s 2025 global payments analysis. Most companies do not need to act on stablecoins yet, but the trajectory is clear: money will keep moving faster, cheaper, and more locally. Businesses that build flexibility into their payment setup now will adapt to those rails without a costly rebuild later.