Uncertainty triggers fear, and fear often leads to panicked decisions. This can happen across a wide-variety of decision-making, and a company’s financial decisions are not immune, which leads to a situation known as panic financing.
Panic financing is that reactive belt-tightening that companies undertake when a perceived economic crisis is looming, which feels like the right decision at the moment, but will actually quietly harm their growth. With ongoing economic headwinds occurring globally, pressure is mounting on CFOs to recession-proof their businesses. While cutting spending seems like the quick fix, there’s an often overlooked antidote: payments.
If CFOs want to create real business resilience in a time of economic uncertainty, they cannot overlook payments. By taking a deeper dive into their payments strategy, CFOs can increase revenues while building resilience that allows them to resist panic financing decisions.
The importance of payments
Payments determine whether hard-won demand becomes cash. When they underperform, revenue leaks through false declines, high cross-border fees, slow settlement, and poor customer experience. For mid-market and enterprise organisations alike, even small inefficiencies compound across thousands of transactions.
Payment delays, lost revenue, false declines, and payment leaks all create significant opportunity costs, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). For these businesses, inefficient payments can spiral into something much more nefarious than just operational issues; they can mean the difference between seizing growth opportunities and missing them entirely.
Payment costs also directly influence pricing decisions, which in turn affect a business’s ability to compete globally. The companies that thrive are those that optimise their payment operations rather than simply absorbing these costs into their pricing models.
CFOs who succeed in today’s competitive landscape are those who reorganise payments as a strategic tool. When payment systems are optimised, businesses can turn financial pressure into opportunity, gaining efficiency, reducing costs and improving performance, thus making businesses more resilient to economic challenges.
Reducing transaction fees, eliminating hidden costs like conversion charges and intermediary commissions, and accelerating settlement times can all unlock significant value. Real-time or next-business-day settlement enhances cash flow, while modern solutions such as Virtual Bank Account Numbers (VBANs) improve speed, transparency, and cost control.
When payments are treated as a strategic lever and not as a back-office expense, CFOs can boost their companies’ profitability, improve competitiveness, and position them for sustainable growth.
Cross-border payments
One area that CFOs typically neglect is cross-border payments. Hidden friction, high fees, and poor authorisation rates can create invisible revenue leaks. In fact, 40% of businesses report cross-border authorisation rates below 70%. For companies operating internationally, this is a significant economic risk.
Businesses expanding internationally often overlook local payment methods (LPMs). With emerging markets bringing new revenue but also complex local preferences, many CFOs dismiss these as an operational burden. Ignoring LPMs and local currencies, however, risks checkout abandonment, as customers are more likely to leave if their preferred payment option isn’t available—ultimately stunting growth.
There are many methods CFOs can employ to make cross-border payments less of a hassle to implement, but also accessible to local customers:
- Offer a localised checkout experience – Present the checkout page in the consumer’s language, display the local currency and offer the correct LPM on the checkout page.
- Leverage local payment rails – Reduces processing times and transaction costs, enabling faster payments and freeing up resources for other priorities.
- Transparent foreign exchange and fee structures – Builds trust with consumers and eliminates hidden costs that affect your bottom line.
- Real-time and next-day settlement options = Strengthens an organisation’s cash position and also makes it more predictable.
If CFOs integrate the right technology into their payments processes and increase transparency, they’ll find it’s easier to identify and solve the problems preventing them from boosting revenue. CFOs must not succumb to panic and react to problems; instead, they must be proactive and fine-tune each step of the payment process.
It’s time to panic-proof your payments strategy
Instead of succumbing to panic financing – reactive belt-tightening that may create short-term stability but long-term stagnation – CFOs need to adopt a smarter, more proactive mindset. That means taking a detailed and critical look at their payments infrastructure.
When payments are optimised, each transaction generates more value, compounding into significant revenue gains. Crucially, payment performance must align with business strategy to prevent revenue leakage and win back market share from competitors.
The objective is to close the gap between strategy and execution. This begins with understanding the revenue opportunity tied to improved acceptance rates, recognising what’s lost to better-performing rivals, and tracking these metrics over time.
Panic financing narrows options. Payments optimisation expands them. In volatile markets, the most resilient companies convert demand efficiently, settle quickly, and keep customers in-flow with a local, trusted checkout. That isn’t “nice to have”, it’s how CFOs defend margin today and fund growth tomorrow.
Don’t wait for a quarterly post-mortem. If you can’t quantify authorisation, cost of acceptance, and days-to-cash by market and method, you can’t manage them. Start there and turn payments into the lever that keeps your strategy on course.
