For many businesses, international expansion promises new customers and faster growth. But in 2026, operating across borders has become significantly more expensive – and not just because of tariffs, inflation, geopolitical challenges or volatile energy prices.
These pressures are squeezing margins and forcing finance leaders to protect profitability.
Yet one of the biggest costs receives little scrutiny. The mechanics of moving and spending money internationally – from foreign exchange (FX) spreads to cross-border card fees – can quietly erode margins with every transaction. Because FX costs come straight off the bottom line, recovering them can lift net margin by up to two percentage points a year – with sectors such as wholesale seeing the biggest gains, where thin margins mean even small savings flow directly to profit.
For many internationally active businesses, the hidden cost of moving money internationally is measured not in basis points, but in tens of thousands of pounds each year.
Michael Wüst, co-founded Amnis in 2014 after feeling the treasury gap as a finance leader himself. As CEO of Amnis, Wüst believes Europe’s mid-market has spent years accepting unnecessary friction as simply the cost of doing business internationally.
“Firstly, they pay exorbitant fees for international transfers, currency exchange and card payments abroad, which can reach 5%. Fees for FX transactions can also reach around 1.5%,” he says. “Secondly, it’s almost impossible for them to open a bank account abroad. Thirdly, they’re using fragmented tools to move and spend money.”
Closing the gap
Historically, SMEs have lacked access to the banking relationships and pricing enjoyed by large multinational organisations. Large organisations can often negotiate bespoke FX pricing with banks and payment providers, while benefiting from treasury and payment infrastructure that most SMEs struggle to access.
Many finance leaders simply don’t realise how much they’re paying
The result is an uneven playing field. Large multinationals have long treated treasury as a strategic capability, using sophisticated banking relationships and centralised financial controls to minimise transaction costs. Mid-market firms, by contrast, often accept standard pricing and fragmented banking arrangements that quietly compound over time.
Wüst says Amnis’ mission is to level the playing field for businesses operating internationally. The firm now serves more than 5,000 businesses across 35 countries. Today the platform processes more than €5bn in payments a year, with a network of around 80,000 companies, fully licensed and with client funds safeguarded.
“If you exchange currencies or pay abroad as a company, there is always a margin in the currency exchange rate,” he says. “Many finance leaders simply don’t realise how much they’re paying.”
The costs add up quickly. Large corporates convert currency at spreads close to zero. Mid-market firms typically pay their bank around 1.5%, and UK high-street margins can run as high as 3.7%. Amnis charges 0.20%. For a business handling currency anyway, closing that gap can recover up to two percentage points of net margin a year.
The impact is disproportionately large in low-margin sectors.
“Businesses often focus on growing revenue by one or two percentage points,” says Wüst. “But for companies operating on 4-5% margins, recovering a single percentage point of avoidable cost can have an outsized impact on profitability.”
An international operating system
Amnis’s model aggregates the payment volumes of thousands of firms, allowing smaller businesses to access FX pricing that would normally be reserved for much larger organisations.
Once finance leaders recognise FX as a controllable cost rather than an unavoidable consequence of international trade, they can scrutinise it alongside procurement, payroll and software spending.
“Cross-border finance is often a patchwork for small and mid-market businesses,” says Wüst. “They have a local bank in every country they are active. They have FX solutions, card programs, treasury tools, expense tools, and glue everything together with spreadsheets.”
Amnis was built to close exactly that gap, giving all businesses a single operating system for international transactions. Businesses can pay, collect and exchange money internationally through a single platform, with local accounts and multi-currency management replacing fragmented banking relationships.
Cross-border finance is often a patchwork for small and mid-market businesses
The benefits extend beyond lower transaction costs. They also create operational efficiencies by reducing the manual workload of their finance teams. Historically, finance teams have spent days each month reconciling payments across multiple banks, currencies and expense systems. Consolidating those activities into a single platform reduces manual administration and frees finance leaders to focus on growth.
The cost of decentralised card programmes
Cards are often the last payment instrument finance teams don’t centrally control – which is exactly why they’re one of the biggest untapped opportunities for improving both governance and profitability.
B2B card payments grew by 58% between 2020 and 2024, according to research from Mastercard, McKinsey and Nilson. Yet for many finance teams, card spending remains one of the least visible areas of business expenditure.
A business spending £50,000 each month cross-border would incur around £18,000 a year in fees if charged 3% on every transaction. Additional FX mark-ups embedded within exchange rates could increase that figure further.
Many of these fees disappear when employees use multi-currency business cards. Amnis’s platform gives leaders the power to instantly issue physical and virtual cards to their staff at 0% fees. From a single dashboard, finance teams can issue or freeze cards instantly, set spending limits by employee or project and monitor spend in real time.
Lower costs are only part of the appeal. Wüst explains that usually, businesses use an expense solution and the bank. Amnis sits alongside the house bank rather than replacing it. The bank keeps the loans, payroll and day-to-day account; Amnis takes on the layer where firms lose the most – FX, cards and multi-currency.
“So you can do your expense management in real-time,” adds Wüst. “The second you pay in a restaurant for your company, you can just take a picture and it’s done – AI reads the receipt and books it. You don’t need to take care of all the receipts, it’s done.”
“We have a customer in the machinery industry with £10 million in revenue – they’re saving 1% on revenue – that’s £100,000 per year in savings,” adds Wüst. “From our research, businesses are also saving 3-5 days per month on busy, manual work.”
For businesses that ignore these costs, the pressure on margins is unlikely to ease.
“Mid-market businesses will continue to overpay on currency conversion, ” says Wüst. “And they’ll continue to face challenges with markups – this currency tax won’t go away.”
As geopolitical uncertainty reshapes international trade, finance leaders cannot control tariffs, interest rates or currency markets. They can, however, control how their organisations move, exchange and spend money. Treasury is no longer simply an operational function. In an environment where every basis point matters, it’s becoming one of the few remaining margin levers finance leaders can directly control.
For many businesses, international expansion promises new customers and faster growth. But in 2026, operating across borders has become significantly more expensive - and not just because of tariffs, inflation, geopolitical challenges or volatile energy prices.
These pressures are squeezing margins and forcing finance leaders to protect profitability.
Yet one of the biggest costs receives little scrutiny. The mechanics of moving and spending money internationally – from foreign exchange (FX) spreads to cross-border card fees – can quietly erode margins with every transaction. Because FX costs come straight off the bottom line, recovering them can lift net margin by up to two percentage points a year - with sectors such as wholesale seeing the biggest gains, where thin margins mean even small savings flow directly to profit.
