Cross-Border Payment Solutions For B2B

No Forrester Wave exists for this category yet. Forrester has mapped the market three times in Landscape reports and has scheduled a further Landscape for November 2026, with the first Wave evaluation to follow in May 2027. What follows is what the research shows now and what the scored evaluation will have to resolve.

Forrester has been covering this market since at least 2022 and has never ranked anyone in it.

That is not neglect. Three Landscape reports exist, mapping twenty one providers in 2022 and nineteen in 2024, and the firm has publicly committed to a Wave in May 2027. A Landscape describes who is in a market. A Wave declares who is better. The five-year gap between those two acts tells you something specific about this category, and it is the most useful thing to understand before shortlisting anything.

The problem underneath

A domestic payment is a ledger entry. Two banks in the same system, one clearing mechanism, settlement in hours.

A cross-border payment historically travelled through correspondent banking. Your bank has a relationship with a bank that has a relationship with a bank in the destination country. The payment hops along that chain, each institution taking a fee, applying its own compliance checks, and adding a day. Nobody in the chain has visibility of the whole route, which is why a business paying a supplier in another country could not answer where the money was or when it would land.

Add to that the foreign exchange spread, which is where much of the cost has traditionally sat and where it is least visible. A transfer advertised as low-fee can carry a margin on the conversion rate that dwarfs the stated fee.

For a business with suppliers, contractors, or subsidiaries in a dozen countries, this compounds into an operational problem rather than a banking one. Reconciliation is manual because remittance data gets stripped in transit. Cash forecasting is guesswork because arrival times vary. And the finance team spends real hours chasing payments that a domestic transfer would have completed before lunch.

What the solutions promise

Forrester's framing of the value has been consistent across both Landscape editions, and it names three things.

Visibility and enriched data about international payments, meaning knowing where a payment is and having the remittance information survive the journey so reconciliation is automatic.

Foreign exchange management, with the 2024 edition adding competitive rates explicitly alongside ease of management. That addition is small and worth noticing: by 2024 Forrester considered pricing on the conversion itself a distinguishing factor rather than a given.

And mitigation of fraud and financial compliance risk, which covers sanctions screening, anti-money-laundering obligations, and the know-your-customer requirements that vary by corridor.

The mechanism most of these providers use is local settlement. Rather than pushing money across borders, they hold accounts in both countries, take funds domestically on one side and pay out domestically on the other, and net the positions internally. The payment never crosses a border. The provider's balance sheet does.

That is why these companies can be faster and cheaper than the correspondent chain, and it is also why their capability is corridor-specific in a way that does not show up in marketing.

Why nobody has been scored

Here is the structural reason this market resisted a Wave for so long.

A Forrester Wave scores vendors against a common criteria set, which works when vendors are solving the same problem for the same buyer. In this category, the thing that determines whether a provider is good for you is which corridors it covers, in which currencies, with what local licensing, at what rate, with which payout methods available at the destination.

A provider that is excellent for euro-to-dollar flows may have nothing useful for a business paying contractors in Southeast Asia. One built for Asia-to-global trade corridors serves a completely different buyer from one built for European treasury operations. Both are competent. They barely compete.

Forrester's own Landscape framing acknowledges this, noting that vendors vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation, and advising buyers to investigate options based on size and market focus rather than against a single ranking.

Geography as a primary differentiator is unusual in enterprise software and it is the norm here. It also means that when the Wave arrives in 2027, the interesting question will be how Forrester handles corridor coverage in a scored comparison, because a criteria set that treats it lightly will produce a ranking that misleads, and one that treats it heavily will produce a ranking that varies by reader.

The consolidation happening now

The reason a Wave is being scheduled is that the market is restructuring fast enough to need one, and Forrester has been documenting it.

Its analysis of recent activity groups the deals into recognisable types. Payment networks and card schemes acquiring new rails, with Mastercard's planned acquisition of BVNK cited as strengthening stablecoin and fiat-rail connectivity. Merchant payment providers expanding into business payments, with Nuvei's acquisition of Payoneer as the example that prompted the analysis.

Forrester's read on what that acquisition signals is that B2B cross-border payments are becoming core infrastructure for how global businesses manage their finances, and that the next phase of competition will be won by providers who reduce operational complexity, compliance risk, and friction across finance workflows rather than by those competing on transfer cost alone.

That framing is worth holding onto. It moves the competitive question from payments to finance operations. A provider that moves money cheaply and leaves your reconciliation manual has solved the smaller half.

The category is also being reshaped from below by companies that never appeared in Western analyst research. Providers built around Asia-to-global trade corridors have reached substantial scale serving small and mid-sized exporters, in markets where the incumbent alternative was a correspondent banking chain that barely functioned. That growth happened largely outside the vendor sets these Landscapes covered.

New rails

The most consequential technical development is the arrival of alternative settlement mechanisms alongside the traditional chain.

Real-time domestic payment schemes have proliferated, and the work to connect them across borders is well underway in several regions. Where those connections exist, the correspondent chain stops being necessary for the corridors they cover.

Stablecoin settlement is the other, and Forrester's inclusion of it in its analysis of the Mastercard deal indicates it has moved from speculative to structural. The proposition is that value moves on a public network in minutes at low cost, with conversion to local currency happening at each end. Several established payment infrastructure providers now settle at least some volume this way.

The honest assessment is that this changes the middle of the transaction and not the ends. Getting local currency in and local currency out still requires licensed entities, banking relationships, and compliance in each jurisdiction. What changes is the cost and speed of the leg between them, which is a real improvement and a smaller share of the total problem than the enthusiasm suggests.

Regulatory treatment also varies sharply by jurisdiction and is still developing in several major markets, which is a reason to understand what a provider actually does under the hood rather than accepting a description of the outcome.

The agentic question

Forrester's coverage of the payments industry notes that agentic commerce dominated conversation at Money20/20 in Amsterdam alongside trust, and that pairing is not accidental.

If software initiates purchases on a business's behalf, cross-border payment becomes something that happens without a human in the approval path. That raises questions this infrastructure was not built to answer.

Authorisation is the obvious one. A payment instruction from an agent needs to be attributable, bounded by limits, and reversible if wrong. Existing payment authorisation models assume a person applied judgement.

Compliance is the harder one. Sanctions screening and anti-money-laundering obligations assume a regulated entity knows who is transacting and why. An agent acting for a business, transacting with a counterparty selected by another agent, complicates the audit trail that those obligations depend on.

None of this is speculative for much longer, and it is a reasonable guess that agent-initiated payment controls will be a scored criterion by the time the 2027 evaluation lands.

What a buyer can do before the Wave

Without a scored evaluation there is no shortlist to inherit, which puts the analytical work back on the buyer. Three things are knowable now.

Your own corridor profile is the first and most important. Which currencies, which destination countries, what volume, what average transaction size, what urgency. That profile determines which providers can serve you at all, and it eliminates most of a nineteen-vendor field before any capability comparison begins.

Total landed cost is the second. The stated fee is rarely the cost. The conversion rate applied against the interbank rate at the moment of execution, plus any receiving charges at the destination, is the number that matters, and it is comparable across providers only if you ask for it that way.

And the reconciliation path is the third, because it is where the operational saving actually sits. Whether remittance data survives to the destination, whether the provider's records reconcile automatically against your accounting system, and whether a payment can be traced end to end without a support ticket.

Those three are answerable through a controlled comparison across a handful of real payments, which is a more reliable exercise than any analyst tier would be even if one existed.

What the 2027 evaluation will have to settle

When the Wave arrives, it will have to make three judgements that the Landscapes deliberately avoided.

Whether corridor coverage is a criterion or a caveat. Treated as a criterion, it favours the largest networks. Treated as a caveat, the ranking becomes advisory rather than decisive.

Whether the category is payments or finance operations. Forrester's own commentary points toward the latter, and if the criteria follow, the winners will be providers with accounts payable, treasury, and enterprise resource planning integration rather than the ones with the tightest spread.

And how to score settlement mechanisms that did not exist when the category formed. A provider settling on new rails is either innovative or carrying regulatory exposure depending on jurisdiction and on how the rules land between now and then.

Those three questions are more interesting than the eventual tier list, and they are decidable now for your own situation regardless of what Forrester concludes in 2027.

Forrester does not endorse any provider named here, and inclusion in a Landscape report is not a rating or a recommendation to buy. Nothing here is financial advice.