The world has changed and instantaneous is the new fast. With banking, things have clearly lagged behind. Technology and transparency were placed second to a multi-departmental bureaucratic nightmare. B2B Pay offers international payments that take full advantage of FinTech and the latest regulations with virtual bank accounts fit for modern businesses.
Problem
International payments are complicated and expensive. Banks are slow, frustrating, and offer little to no support. Once money is sent, there is little way to track where it is in the transaction process.
Without B2B Pay, your company:
- Cannot open a bank account in Europe
- Cannot collect or send domestic wire transfers (SEPA Payments)
- Pays SWIFT fee of €30
- Pays currency conversion cost of 3-6%
- Cannot access local payment gateways
- Suffers the Frustration of bureaucratic banking processes
- Cannot collect payments from marketplaces like Amazon
- Takes 2-5 days per transfer
Solution
A virtual bank account with unique IBAN number for non-resident companies. The account is linked to your home bank account in your home country. You get a faster, 80% cheaper and transparent B2B transfer.
With B2B Pay, your company:
- Receives SEPA payments from 35 EU countries for free in 2-12 hours
- Makes SEPA payments to 35 EU countries
- Saves €30 SWIFT charges and +80% on FX
- Takes advantage of FX conversion automation
- Uses its IBAN to integrate with marketplaces and payment gateways
- Accesses premium brokers to make global payments in 138 currencies
- Gets Instant notifications of incoming payments
- Takes advantage of online onboarding
Good customer service
Our clients receive fast and professional support, which includes responses within 1 business day and fast approval of your account. Provided all is fine with the documents you submitted, you can expect it to be up and running within 24 hours, in more complex cases, within a week.
All that is done with exceptional due diligence standards and expert compliance officers approve each account. We also help you choose the right type of account for your kind of business and needs.
Cost savings
Our services allow you to save up to 80% on banking fees, especially if you’re doing international business with countries outside of the European Union/SEPA system, or if your business is located outside of the SEPA zone, but you’d like to transfer money with the SEPA countries.
We also provide various industries with tailored services, including education, SMEs, corporate needs, NGOs, import/export companies, etc. Have a look at the list above to read more about each of these proposals.
Agility
In the case of e-commerce and low-risk businesses, our clients can have their accounts up and running within 1-2 working days. When dealing with more risky and complex cases, this process can take up to 1 week. We take care of picking the right banks and banking options for our clients, and we work with some of the best-renowned banks on the market.
Less complexity
We have replaced bureaucratic, paper-heavy processes related to opening a bank account with a simple, 3-step application available through our user-friendly dashboard. We provide you with all the necessary documents for the right type of account, which we then verify for you and, once all of that is in order, approve and open the account for you.
Sending money to Brazil from Europe can take 3 or 4 days and the conversion fees are 5% or more. FinTechs use automatic processes and bulk transfers to lower that fee to 1-2%. But just lowering the fee isn’t enough: using blockchain technology, sending money to Brazil takes hours.
B2B International payments
When it comes to B2B international payments, there are not many options. In almost all cases, the European company will simply initiate a payment with their local bank, which will then send the money to the non-resident partner's bank, possibly through some intermediary banks. Each bank makes money on the transaction. Consequently, the incurred fees are at least 3% and can - at times - even exceed 6%. For a transaction of 50,000€, this can mean fees between 1,500€ and 4,000€. There is a huge potential for savings! Considering that most profit margins are not very big for global companies in competitive markets that need a B2B money transfer, finding a solution is important. B2B Pay offers that possibility.
Growth of Global B2B Payments
With the exception of 2009, global trade has been growing year on year for the past two decades. In Europe alone, the numbers are in the trillions and projections of continuous growth.
Your own B2B international payments account
With B2B Pay, non-EU companies of can get their own European IBAN number, which they can include on invoices. The European partner can do a simple SEPA transaction to pay you. When the money arrives in your European account, B2B Pay sends the money for a very low fee to your local bank account. We can do this thanks to our partnerships with bluechip banks such as Barclays and Nordea.
Spread costs on global B2B payments
Next to transaction fees, banks charge an additional fee related to currency exchange when buying goods abroad. These charges vary, depending on the bank and the currencies, and can reach up to 10% of the whole transaction, and they’re called spread. Spread will be reflected in the difference between the price of the goods you buy, as per “real” currency exchange rates, and the price you actually paid once your bank converted the currencies and charged its own rate, often slightly higher than the official once.
That difference can be negotiated with the bank case by case, especially when dealing with big transactions, or it can be omitted entirely with the help of our services. B2B Pay offers international B2B payments with exchange rates much closer to the mid-market price. The total costs of our transactions from Europe to any country are 1%, saving a company 250€ on a 10k€ transaction.
What are the different options for business to business money transfers?
There are three main types of transfers available to businesses - SEPA, SWIFT and our B2B Pay solution.
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Within Europe: SEPA is a viable option for companies that do business within the European Union. Inside the Single Euro Payment Area, you have access to fixed rates for bank transfers and fast international transactions.
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Globally: SWIFT international transactions, based on a protocol established some 60 years ago in Brussels, allows to standardize and secure traditional bank transfers between banks that operate in over 200 countries. Nevertheless, the fees for such transfers, as well as the time in which they are done, vary significantly between countries and can reach up to 50 Euros, multiple currency conversions and take up to 3 months in some cases. Not to mention occasional paperwork needed to authorize the transfer.
- B2B Pay: IBAN account number for non-resident companies. IBAN accounts are assigned to countries in Europe (excluding Russia), and outside of it - a total of 77 as of December 2020. It allows for quick validation of the bank account and ownership and it is a widely used standard for international bank transactions. With our account, you get a SEPA IBAN account and you are benefiting from access to some of the most secure, cheap, and fast solutions available, no matter where you live and conduct business.
Cross-border payments for B2B
Cross-border payments for B2B can be expensive
These are the various types of cross-border payments:
B2B supplier payments
Salary B2B money transfer
E-commerce purchases, including digital goods
international B2B e-commerce
Forex payments
Payroll, benefits, and retirement payments are most often C2C, but can also include B2B-type payments to contractors for IT work
Remittances: payments made by foreign workers to family in home countries, measured by country pairs, or "corridors".
The size of global B2B payments
According to WTO and World Bank sources, global trade amounted to over 19 trillion USD in 2018, while the total size of B2B payments globally crossed 732 billion USD.
EU B2B cross-border payments & B2B Money Transfer
Within the European Union, most B2B cross-border transactions are done in Euro and handled through SEPA. It's now as cheap and quick to make a Euro payment within the EU as inside a single country.
According to Eurostat and the WTO, the EU is the biggest trading block and it accounts for 16% of the total world imports and exports. For 80 countries, the European Union is the top trading partner.
Save 80% on cross-border payments & B2B supplier payments
B2B Pay provides a payment solution to any company outside of Europe, which cuts through bureaucracy and 80% of the fees. Our customers receive a European IBAN number, which can be used to receive payments from 34 countries. When the money comes in (through a simple SEPA payment), we send it to the local bank of the exporter for a fee of 1%.
We are powered by two major banks. One of them is Barclays, a multinational investment bank and financial services company with headquarters in London, 330 years of experience and presence in 40 countries. Our other partner is Nordea, a Nordic bank with headquarters in Helsinki, operating in 20 countries (with presence in Singapore, the US, Brazil, China and Russia), with over 700.000 corporate clients.
Further reading
- European Commission: the position of the EU in world trade (some facts and figures, as well as elaboration on the importance of the EU as a global trading power)
- Wikipedia: List of countries by leading trading partners (most up-to-date resource listing export and import partners for each country in the world)