The Role of Banking For Cross-Border Payment Providers

The remittance company you run is planning an expansion into Southeast Asia, a sensible move given the density of flows that pass through its corridors. Migrant-laborers across the globe send billions back to the Philippines and Thailand. Domestically, the rails are top-notch, some of the best in the world. Cross-border is a different story, but you have a liquidity provider that you trust to make sure payments settle when you expect them to.

Everything seems to be in place, and the opportunity seems more than worth it, that is if you can find a place to put the money.

For a fintech trying to scale globally, one of the most frustrating items on their checklist is something that in most other contexts we take for granted, a bank account.

Or should a say, potentially dozens of bank accounts.

Dozens of Accounts

Let's say one of your new customers in Singapore wants to send money back home to their family in Manila. The Philippine pesos they are "sending" must actually be sourced from a peso-denominated bank account that your treasury team funded weeks ago. The SGD stays in yet another local bank account you maintain on the Singaporean side. To complete these transactions, both of these accounts must be in good standing.

From your customer's perspective, $500 moved from Singapore to Manila in a handful of minutes, from your perspective this is one of perhaps a dozen ledger entries that must later be squared, likely by a multi-million dollar cross-border transfer designed to top up the accounts that you need to do business in these corridors.

It seems "fast and easy," for them at least.

This same song and dance is required for every country you choose to operate in. Singapore needs a bank account, so does Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia, and on and on and on. In many cases you'll need at least two accounts, one to hold any operational funds you need to do business, and another to hold segregated funds for your customers.

This starts to add up pretty quickly, and each of these bank accounts requires more than a few signatures, some need difficult to acquire local licensing, many need to maintain large balances, all put you under the thumb of whatever compliance and regulatory system the home country maintains.

Getting this sorted for a single country might take six months, and that's assuming they are willing to do business with you at all, which is not a foregone conclusion.

Let's look at a few examples.

Getting Permission

Singapore is the obvious first stop, most of the region's cross-border volume routes through it, and MAS runs one of the most respected regulatory regimes in the world. Singapore is also considered one of the more demanding polities to deal with on the planet. Before you can build a banking relationship, MAS will need to evaluate just about everyone in your organization from the boardroom on down. Your directors, your shareholders, individual compliance staff, all require some amount of scrutiny.

The person you hired a few weeks back to manage AML is now under the microscope of the Singaporean government. On top of all of this, you'll need a Singaporean citizen to sit on your board as an executive director before MAS will even begin processing your application. All in, this could take upwards of one year.

How about the Philippines, one of the worlds biggest remittance corridors? Foreign companies can't apply there at all. The BSP requires that you first incorporate as a Philippine subsidiary, and register that subsidiary with their AML council. To open an account, you're going to have to open an entirely different business.

Our final stop is Thailand, where you'll need to get the sign-off from two separate government bodies and offer up roughly $3M U.S. dollars in minimum capital. This money is required to maintain the account at all. Vietnam also has had a rousing public debate about how much of your own company you should be able to own if you operate there, which is soemthing else you're going to have to manage.

I could go on, but I won't. This is also not a problem unique to Asia, no matter where you want to move money, managing banking relationships will likely take up a meaningful fraction of your staff's time.

Thirty Days

These permissions, once granted, are always provisional. A bank in any of these markets can send you a letter saying they don't want to deal with you any longer, and offer 30-days for you to find a new institution. If you don't, the corridors that rely on those pre-funded accounts are essentially dead.

While debanking has slowed somewhat in the last few years, as recently as January 2026, U.S. regulators were still pushing back on banks that refuse to serve money-services businesses as a blanket policy.

Why We Built Multi-Currency Accounts

We think this is kind of silly, and that it's unlikely to change anytime soon.

Even more so than the incentives that push institutional finance to avoid reducing settlement times for most of the world, this problem is baked into the very bones of cross-border FX. The banking systems of different countries rarely have cause to talk to one another, and their regulatory state is even less inclined to believe their neighbors should be trusted.

This is why we are building our multi-currency account product, so our fintech partners can operate across corridors, without managing dozens of different relationships. We don't think every remittance provider or PSP or ramp should be solving this same, onerous issue over and over again. You should be able to expand your business, without worrying about the overhead.