With more businesses selling online or through mobile apps, more consumers are jumping online to shop and pay. Merchants are therefore in a rush to ensure they offer fast and seamless cross-border payment experiences while supporting payment preferences that vary widely from market to market.

This rise of e-commerce has led customers to develop high expectations for simple, seamless and secure digital payment experiences, as documented in “The New Singularity”, a collaboration between PYMNTS and USEND.

Get the report: The new singularity

B2B e-commerce is seeing similar growth, driven in part by digital-savvy millennials moving into leadership positions with purchasing power. Comfortable with digital payment and self-service capabilities, they have more or less abandoned traditional modes of purchasing goods.

This has presented a challenge for wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers dealing with wholesale, as B2B transactions are often priced higher than business-to-consumer (B2C) purchases. This means online merchants need to redouble their efforts to build trust and highly tactile payment experiences while capitalizing on the efficiencies offered by digitalization.

Meeting expectations in the cross-border arena

The great digital shift has enabled all kinds of merchants, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to move beyond their home territories and across borders to tap into new markets, Ran Grushkowsky said. , COO and CTO of USEND, to PYMNTS.

Read more: Compliance automation is key to making X-Border payments faster and cheaper

Not all payout abilities are equal here. Businesses and consumers expect their banks to deliver a consistent user experience (UX) across many digital channels. This means that financial institutions (FIs) must offer flexible cross-border payment offers compatible with a wide range of digital technologies.

Third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) are a cost-effective way for banks to support these functions – far better than the alternative, rebuilding their IT infrastructures from scratch, which takes more time and resources that many cannot afford.

APIs deliver omnichannel experiences using data collection and analysis. They can be integrated with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of banks or e-commerce companies, which collect data from the digital applications of these institutions. End users therefore benefit from the same personalized banking and payment experiences across all channels.

The infrastructure flexibility offered by APIs also gives banks and other FIs access to a wide range of back-end technologies that can facilitate cross-border transactions. Information from these technologies can then be used to streamline and automate digital cross-border payments while providing the real-time payment data end users need to track the progress of their cross-border transactions.

Stay competitive in a global e-commerce market

To stay competitive in an increasingly globalized e-commerce market, FIs and merchants need to provide seamless payment experiences to their customers. This means enabling fast, simple and seamless cross-border payments while ensuring data security and ensuring compliance with a host of global regulations.

With the help of third-party APIs, FIs and global enterprises can meet these challenges head-on. APIs designed to address regulatory compliance and data security challenges can help further streamline cross-border payments.

Through APIs, companies can access customer data, leveraging this information to develop innovative products and service offerings that engage customers and extend their global reach.