Do you have what it takes to scale globally?

7 high-stakes questions every growing business should ask

At a certain stage of growth, international expansion can feel like a moment of validation – confirmation that the product works, demand is real, and the company is ready to compete on a bigger stage.

According to the 2025 Grant Thornton International Business Report, 56% of business leaders worldwide expect to increase exports, and roughly half expect revenue from non-domestic markets to grow – a strong signal of cross-border ambition. Meanwhile, 70% of small and medium enterprises report plans to expand globally within the next two years, despite acknowledging gaps in readiness. 

International expansion puts pressure on finance systems. Tools built for a single market often struggle across currencies, regulations, and payment rails. Visibility into cash, costs, and risk quickly breaks down. 

That lack of visibility quickly turns into friction, especially at scale. In 2024, one-third of retail cross-border payments still took more than one business day to settle, and many corridors cost more than 3% per transaction – delays and fees that compound as volume grows.

Even globally successful companies have retreated from foreign markets – Target from Canada, Wayfair from Germany – when operational complexity outpaced expectations. The lesson is consistent: international expansion is a test of execution, not just ambition.

Before entering your next market, it’s worth pausing to ask seven questions that help determine whether your financial and operational infrastructure is truly built to scale.

1. Can you pay customers, employees, and vendors like a local, without workarounds?

Customers expect to pay in their own currency and use familiar payment methods. Employees expect to be paid accurately and on time. Vendors expect settlement without friction or surprise fees. 

Research shows that payment experiences matter more than ever in cross-border markets. A 2025 cross-border commerce report found that 99% of international shoppers expect local payment options and 94% expect to pay in local currency. What’s more, 57% choose where to buy based on available payment methods – a clear signal that local payment experiences are a driver of trust and conversion in global commerce.

When those expectations aren’t met, teams often resort to temporary fixes like manual conversions, extra accounts, or third-party intermediaries. Bandaid-style workarounds rarely stay temporary. What starts as a one-off solution – routing payments through a single headquarters account or managing payroll through local providers – can quickly become dozens of exceptions across markets, currencies, and time zones.

The question isn’t whether you can make payments work today; it’s whether your approach will still work six or twelve months from now, when transaction volume, headcount, and market complexity increase.

2. Do you clearly understand which compliance requirements apply?

Compliance is one of the least glamorous parts of expansion – and one of the most unforgiving.

Tax obligations, data protection rules, consumer protection laws, payroll requirements: many apply even if you don’t have a local entity. Others are triggered once you cross specific revenue thresholds. What makes this tricky is that the rules vary by market, and assumptions that hold in North America don’t always translate elsewhere.

For example, under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, companies can be subject to data protection and reporting requirements simply by handling the personal data of EU residents, regardless of where the business is headquartered. High-profile cases involving China-based TikTok and US-based Meta illustrate the risk: both have faced multimillion-euro fines after expanding into Europe without fully accounting for how different consent, data storage, and reporting standards are enforced. 

Less obvious – but just as consequential – are the financial compliance requirements tied to how money moves. Payment processing rules, sanctions screening, expense documentation, and audit trails can all introduce risk if they’re handled differently across regions or managed through disconnected systems. For example, the Bank of England fined US-owned payments infrastructure operator Vocalink £11.9 million after finding weaknesses in its compliance systems and risk controls – a reminder that even established processors can face penalties when regulatory expectations outpace internal legacy systems. 

According to Deloitte, regulatory and compliance complexity will continue to be a leading challenge for companies operating internationally in the coming years – one that can slow expansion plans or force difficult course corrections. 

3. Will your checkout experience feel familiar or foreign to new customers?

In practice, “global” matters far less to customers. They’re simply interested in a checkout that feels local. Customers don’t judge checkout experiences as “cross-border.” They judge whether they feel familiar, transparent, and trustworthy. 

According to one report, nearly all cross-border shoppers surveyed (99%) indicate they expect to pay in their local currency using familiar payment methods, and more than half say ease of checkout influences where they choose to buy. In practice, meeting those expectations comes down to clear local pricing, trusted payment options, visible security cues, and a mobile-friendly checkout.

Just as important, payments that are processed locally, rather than routed cross-border, are more likely to be approved, settled quickly, and trusted by customers. Local processing doesn’t just improve experience – it improves authorization rates, settlement speed, and customer trust.

Even minor checkout friction can derail conversion. Baymard estimates that around 70% of global carts are abandoned, largely due to checkout issues – trust, payment choice, pricing clarity, and complexity – where local execution, not demand, shapes outcomes.

If your checkout experience asks customers to adapt to you, rather than the other way around, growth in the new market may plateau faster than expected.

4. Can your finance team see cash flow clearly across regions, in real time?

Expansion doesn’t just add revenue – it adds layers of complexity. Each new market introduces vendors, currencies, settlement schedules, expense flows, and funding decisions, all managed in parallel.

McKinsey’s recent CFO research underscores the growing importance of timely, accurate financial insight and predictive planning as companies scale and navigate complexity. In fact, 93% of finance teams report data management as their top challenge, with most relying on four or more separate tools just to scrape together reliable information.

Without consolidated visibility, finance teams often see issues only after cash has moved, expenses have been reimbursed, or the month has closed – when intervention is no longer possible. True visibility means understanding not just balances, but how cash is moving, settling, and being spent across regions in real time.

A simple test: if leadership asked for a real-time view of global cash, including pending settlements and expenses in flight, could finance answer with confidence today?

5. Are you actively limiting exposure to foreign exchange fees before they hit your margins?

Foreign exchange (FX) costs are among the easiest drains on international margins to underestimate and among the hardest to spot once volume scales.

Markup on exchange rates, unnecessary conversions, and intermediary fees may seem minor in isolation. In practice, they compound quickly. Global treasury advisors note that 9 out of 10 companies unknowingly pay excessive FX margins above market rates, largely because FX costs are embedded in exchange rates, not surfaced as explicit fees or tracked centrally.

The risk is highest when FX is negotiated one-on-one with a single bank. Without benchmarking or multi-provider pricing, businesses can overpay by up to 20x the fair market rate for certain conversions, especially outside highly liquid currency pairs.

Not all currency pairs behave the same. Highly liquid G10 currencies (such as USD, EUR, and GBP) typically attract tighter spreads, while less-traded or “exotic” currencies carry higher costs due to increased risk and lower market depth. FX becomes controllable when teams decide when conversions occur, which currencies to hold, and how transactions are routed – rather than accepting default pricing.

If you don’t know when conversions happen, which currencies are involved, and what margins you’re paying, there’s a strong chance FX fees are costing more than you realize.

6. Will scaling require more vendors, or fewer?

To operate locally, companies often layer on new financial systems:

• A local bank account to receive and hold funds

• A regional payment service provider to support domestic payment methods

• Separate FX arrangements to convert and settle currency

• Local cards and expense tools to reimburse employees

Each solves a real local requirement, but none is designed to work in harmony with the others.

What if the bank account you’ve relied on doesn’t support local payment rails in new markets, or customers expect payment methods your existing processor can’t offer? Payroll may need to be funded from an in-country account, while employee expenses are submitted in a new currency through unfamiliar tools. Even FX pricing behaves differently abroad than it does at home.

This is where the money traps appear. FX costs hide in rates. Settlement timing fragments cash visibility. Expenses are approved locally but reconciled centrally weeks later. What starts as flexibility becomes drag.

Fragmentation in financial systems – different rules, rails, and infrastructure across markets – adds real cost and friction to cross-border operations. Recent research from the World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman shows that fragmented financial infrastructure increases friction and slows cross-border activity by reducing efficiency and transparency at scale.

The real question isn’t whether expansion requires local banking, payments, and spend support. The question is whether each new country adds another disconnected system or plugs into an existing, scalable financial foundation.

7. If growth accelerates faster than planned, will your infrastructure keep up?

This may be the hardest question to answer – and the most important.

Many expansion plans assume linear growth. And yet, seasonal spikes, viral demand, or successful partnerships can push volume higher, faster than expected. When systems aren’t designed to scale, cracks appear quickly: payment authorization rates drop, settlement delays strain cash flow, FX activity multiplies, and teams are overwhelmed by transaction volume.

Infrastructure that works at one stage of growth may not work at the next. The challenge is that upgrading after problems surface is far more disruptive than building with scale in mind from the start. Retrofitting under pressure is almost always more expensive – and more disruptive – than building for variability upfront.

Even high-performing companies may only be delivering 70% of their strategic potential, with the gap driven largely by shortcomings in their operating models. As businesses expand across borders and complexity increases, those shortcomings tend to surface quickly – especially in how money moves, settles, and is governed.

The real test isn’t whether your systems work today. It’s whether they’ll still work when growth arrives sooner – and in more places – than expected.

Scaling globally starts with a strong foundation 

None of these questions are meant to discourage global ambition. In fact, they’re usually asked by companies that are already on the path to expansion – and want to do it well.

Global readiness isn’t about eliminating complexity – it’s about understanding where it lives, how it grows, and how prepared your business is to manage it. The companies that scale well aren’t the ones that move fastest. They’re the ones that build foundations strong enough to support momentum when it arrives.

Asking these questions early doesn’t slow growth. More often, it’s what allows growth to last.

Eager to learn more?

Whether you’re looking to expand to the US, UK, Southeast Asia, Mainland Europe, Hong Kong, or Australia/New Zealand, Airwallex has a detailed expansion guide, a global financial platform and infrastructure designed for scale, and support to help you make that leap.