August 25 – PingPong is honored to be named Best Cross-Border B2B Payment Company (Asia) by International Banker for 2025.
This award signifies a culmination of both our hard work and success over the past decade in making cross-border payments seamless and simple for businesses around the world. We're excited to continue building innovative solutions that strengthen the entire payments ecosystem, with a global team of experts leading the way.
Read the full editorial op-ed featured originally published on August 25th in International Banker, below.
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How Compliance-First Approaches Power Cross-Border Solutions
The fintech landscape of 2025 does not bear any resemblance to the disruptive energy following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Today’s winners understand a fundamental shift: Compliance is not friction, but instead, a competitive advantage. The reality is that regulatory standards and enforcement will only get tougher.
Smart compliance does not slow you down. Done effectively, it accelerates everything customers value while creating a solid foundation for sustainable partnerships.
Those who succeed will have cracked the code. Success comes from treating every regulatory requirement as a customer-experience opportunity. Winners optimize for compliance-first approaches that turn regulatory requirements into three wins: better customer experience, product growth, and operational efficiency.
When Compliance Becomes Customer Experience
Traditional thinking treats compliance as a major source of friction in the business. Smart fintechs reverse that equation, with every regulatory requirement becoming an opportunity to eliminate customer pain points reliably and securely.
Cross-border payments illustrate this in particular. Traditional transactions take three to five days, often interrupted by cut-offs or manual reviews. Enterprise customers wait weeks to set up their accounts. Suppliers track payment confirmations across various time zones.
The problems multiply. Enterprise chief financial officers (CFOs) struggle with hidden charges and opaque fee structures. Exchange rate markups typically cost 2-5% of international payment volumes. Compliance teams juggle multiple vendor relationships with different documentation requirements. Treasury departments manage various inconsistent reporting formats. Legal teams navigate varying contract terms and liability structures, negatively impacting strategy and workflows.
Companies building compliance automation from Day One eliminate these pain points entirely. Automated onboarding and AI-driven risk monitoring prove this approach works. Enterprise customers deploy faster without sacrificing security. Real-time risk checks happen invisibly. Dynamic monitoring prevents issues before customers experience them. What previously took weeks now happens in hours, sometimes even seconds.
Seamless compliance delivers what customers want: Fast, reliable, transparent payments with zero regulatory headaches.
This requires a different system of design from the ground up. Earlier payment platforms traditionally treated compliance as a separate layer, bolted onto existing systems. Today’s leaders integrate compliance directly into user experience and core system design from inception and ensure flexibility so capabilities can stay up to date in a rapidly changing environment.
Machine learning algorithms continuously monitor transaction patterns for anomalies. AI automates risk assessments in real-time. Cloud infrastructures enable instant regulatory reporting capabilities across multiple jurisdictions. API-first architectures allow for seamless integration with banking partners’ compliance systems.
The underlying infrastructure demands several components: Real-time transaction monitoring, automated regulatory reporting engines, multi-jurisdictional data residency compliance, and API architectures. These systems handle thousands of concurrent compliance checks without degrading customer experience. This infrastructure eliminates traditional compliance delays that killed momentum, enabling solutions such as Straight-Through processing (STP) of transactions and automated onboarding.
Building Infrastructure That Benefits Everyone
Compliance foresight creates value beyond individual companies. When fintechs invest early in robust regulatory frameworks, they strengthen entire ecosystems.
Consider PingPong’s global licensing approach, securing 60+ financial licenses across major economies. This was not defensive; it was ecosystem-building. Each license opened new corridors for cross-border commerce. Every regulatory relationship opens opportunities for PingPong to support other businesses’ growth internationally.
Rigorous compliance standards create natural barriers against bad actors. When legitimate players invest in proper KYC, AML and monitoring systems, they make network access harder for fraudulent operators. Compliance-first fintechs working with banks essentially crowdsource network security, with each compliant connection strengthening the entire network’s integrity.
Our European Union (EU) strategy exemplifies this thinking, enabling same-day EUR transfers that previously took multiple days. It wasn’t easy to accomplish: We obtained Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licensing and Luxembourg CSSF (Commission de surveillance du secteur financier) authorization. Our strategy has evolved to include direct SEPA participation, enabling faster, more transparent cross-border B2B transactions for enterprises. Recent approvals in Malaysia and in-principle United Arab Emirates (UAE) authorization facilitate Asian and Middle Eastern market entry.
Beyond these major jurisdictions, companies must navigate Singapore’s MAS licensing for Asian markets, Canada’s FINTRAC requirements, and emerging frameworks in markets like Nigeria and Brazil where regulatory standards are rapidly evolving. Each regulatory approval creates new cross-border commerce pathways.
When companies establish regulatory precedents, they create clearer channels for innovation. At the same time, these precedents make it harder for rogue operators to exploit regulatory gaps. Banks gain confidence in fintech partnerships. Regulators develop clearer frameworks. Non-compliant players find fewer entry points. Customers benefit from more competitive options in cleaner ecosystems.
Implementing compliance-first approaches requires substantial upfront investment and strategic commitment. Companies must build comprehensive risk-management systems and establish relationships with regulatory authorities across multiple jurisdictions. There is also a need to develop internal expertise in diverse compliance frameworks. These investments typically require 2-3 years to build out. Regulatory approvals consume 1-2 years per jurisdiction. The early investment is critical for competitive timing and creates measurable effects across the entire financial services ecosystem. PingPong’s decade-long journey building regulatory compliance frameworks globally demonstrates that comprehensive infrastructure requires sustained investment, with our licensing portfolio expanding from initial markets to 60+ jurisdictions through systematic regulatory relationship building.
The investment creates sustainable competitive advantages, entering markets in months, not years. Companies completing comprehensive licensing processes gain first-mover advantages in newly accessible markets. They create proprietary ecosystems that enable better end-to-end service to customers across the globe. Regulatory relationships developed during approval processes create ongoing dialogue opportunities, informing product development and market strategy. The barriers compliance-first approaches create protect established market positions.
When PingPong launched our B2B cross-border payment solution supporting merchants in EU direct-to-consumer markets, we gained a competitive advantage while establishing regulatory pathways that other compliant players could follow, with technical standards benefiting the entire cross-border payment sector. Our comprehensive licensing process required extensive regulatory dialogue and framework development.
Each approval process helped regulators better understand fintech capabilities and risk management, while creating straightforward guidelines for future market entrants. These relationships become strategic assets, with regulators consulting established players on new frameworks, and early dialogue shapes rules that competitors must later follow. The result created faster more predictable approval processes for legitimate operators while maintaining barriers against bad actors.
The Collaboration Advantage
The partnership imperative is clear: Cornerstone Advisors’ “What’s Going On In Banking 2023” study confirmed that 70% of financial institutions now view partnerships as critical to their business strategies. Banks face a choice: Build fintech capabilities internally, which requires years and significant investment and execution risk, or partner with compliant fintechs that have already solved these problems.
This shift reflects changing market dynamics. Banks recognize that they need fintech agility. Fintechs need banking infrastructure and regulatory expertise. Strategic partnerships demonstrate this advantage. Banks gain instant cross-border payment innovation without building from scratch. Fintechs leverage established banking infrastructure and customer relationships. Neither party could deliver equivalent customer value alone.
Technical integration potential tells the story. When properly executed, USD payments between major financial centers process in seconds, 24/7, instead of traditional three-day waits. API connectivity automates FX requests and executes them in real time. The need for manual intervention largely disappears, and compliance teams can focus on high-value activities.
Different partnership models have been evolving that demonstrate collaborative evolution:
- Leading platforms orchestrate multiple banking partnerships behind the scenes, connecting card processors, payment rails, and digital wallets to enable seamless payments without customers leaving their platforms.
- Some fintechs embed directly into bank offerings as white-label solutions; others create marketplace models connecting multiple financial institutions.
- Platform orchestrators manage entire payment ecosystems behind unified customer interfaces.
These examples illustrate maturation from simple vendor relationships to strategic partnerships where both parties contribute core capabilities.
When compliance-first fintechs partner with established banks, they create solutions neither traditional banking nor standalone fintech can match.
The real competitive advantage runs much deeper. When compliance-first fintechs partner with established banks, they create solutions neither traditional banking nor standalone fintech can match. Banks get agility without regulatory risk, and fintechs get scale without infrastructure investment. Both parties benefit from enhanced customer satisfaction, faster product launches, and expanded geographical reach.
Beyond basic cross-border payments, successful compliance-first platforms provide integrated currencies, treasury-management systems optimizing cash flows across multiple jurisdictions, VAT payment capabilities streamlining international tax compliance, sophisticated foreign-exchange services reducing currency risk, and factoring services improving working-capital management.
Each service integration requires extensive regulatory preparation, but this investment creates decisive competitive differentiation. Enterprise customers consolidate 5-7 vendor relationships into one platform, accessing global payment capabilities without managing multiple compliance frameworks. Banks prefer working with comprehensive, well-regulated platforms rather than managing separate due diligence for numerous specialized vendors.
PingPong has processed a significant volume of cross-border payments, over $300 billion across 200 countries and regions, demonstrating what becomes possible when compliance enables partnership rather than prevents it. This scale reflects the compound benefits of a comprehensive regulatory infrastructure—each new service builds on existing compliance foundations rather than starting from scratch.
The New Competitive Reality
Industry research found 90% of financial institutions struggle with compliance when sponsoring fintech partnerships, creating clear market separation. The fragmented regulatory landscape compounds these difficulties. Regulatory complexity varies dramatically across markets—from FCA in the UK, to FinCEN and state regulators in the US, to CBUAE in UAE.
The challenges are both specific and substantial. Recent embedded finance studies identified “lack of control and audibility over fintech partners’ policy controls” as the primary obstacle, followed by “managing compliance across multiple jurisdictions and adaptation to evolving regulatory changes.”
Companies that successfully navigate these diverse requirements gain sustainable competitive advantages, while those that treat compliance as an afterthought face mounting regulatory risks and rejections.
Each data breach, failed KYC process, or fraud incident erodes brand equity. In digital-first markets, trust must be earned through demonstrated compliance performance. Fintechs that prioritize transparency, governance, and ethical infrastructure attract institutional partners who view regulatory rigor as long-term viability signals.
Fintechs that solve compliance challenges early gain first-mover advantages in partnership opportunities. Banks that embrace these partnerships deliver better customer experiences than competitors building alone. These advantages become harder to replicate as markets mature.
This dynamic reshapes entire industries. Cross-border payments traditionally meant choosing between fast but risky or slow but safe. Compliance-first partnerships eliminate this tradeoff. Customers get speed, security, and global reach with an all-in-one solution.
This maturation creates new opportunities for established players. Traditional financial institutions that once viewed fintech as a competitive threat now recognize compliance-first fintechs as strategic enablers. The shift from defensive positioning to collaborative partnership unlocks innovation potential that neither sector could achieve independently.
Regulatory authorities also benefit from this evolution. Rather than playing catch-up with fast-moving but potentially risky innovations, regulators can work with compliance-first fintechs to develop frameworks encouraging innovation while maintaining consumer protection and financial stability.
The window for this advantage will not stay open forever. As more recognize the pattern, compliance-first approaches will become table stakes.
The window for this advantage will not stay open forever. As more recognize the pattern, compliance-first approaches will become table stakes. Today, companies combining regulatory foresight with customer-focused execution will be best positioned to shape and take full advantage of tomorrow’s financial infrastructure. These advantages, however, are temporary by nature and require continuous innovation to sustain.
This trajectory suggests compliance-first approaches will become the industry standard rather than a competitive differentiator within three to five years. Companies establishing these foundations today position themselves advantageously for a future where regulatory excellence is expected rather than exceptional. First-mover advantages available now—preferred-partnership status, regulatory-relationship development, and market-access timing—will diminish as approaches become widespread.
Industry leaders face a simple reality: Invest in compliance-first infrastructure now, or risk falling behind as regulatory standards tighten. Those who act early will secure competitive advantages that become harder to achieve as the market matures.
The question is not whether compliance and innovation can coexist. It is whether your approach to compliance becomes your competitive advantage, or someone else’s.