Show Notes
Many companies expect gig workers to deliver fast, reliable work—but the way they’re paid often tells a very different story. Behind the scenes, payouts can lag days or even weeks, get chipped away by fees, and disappear into layers of currency conversion and compliance hurdles that most contractors never see coming.
This gap between real-time work and delayed compensation becomes even more pronounced in cross-border payments, where long-standing friction points persist: settlement delays, hidden costs, currency conversion, regional regulations, and limited visibility into where money actually is at any given moment.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, and James Wester, Director of Cryptocurrency at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the many ways in which leveraging digital assets for payouts can create a more effective solution.
Not only can crypto payouts address operational challenges, but implementing efficient global payout systems can also be a key differentiator when it comes to attracting and retaining vital talent in a competitive market.
The Operational Pain Points
The issues with cross-border payments only intensify as organizations scale high-volume international payouts. Although cost is often the most visible concern, many of these expenses are not immediately obvious.
“It's not the payout itself that costs a lot, it's the operational overhead that comes with this payout,” Lifshits said. “There are things like reconciliation, operational failures, and support tickets that come with failed payouts, and all kinds of manual operations are needed. If we're talking about 100 payouts, it's one fee. If we're talking about 100,000 payouts, it's another fee because at scale we're talking about additional infrastructure.”
Understanding fee structures is just one aspect of the broader operational complexity facing finance teams at global organizations. These teams must manage multiple banks and fiat currencies while continuously staying current on regional regulatory, tax, and compliance requirements.
While this is challenging for organizations, payout inefficiencies can be even more detrimental for contractors. One of the biggest obstacles for small businesses—and especially freelancers, creators, and gig workers—is cash flow.
Budgets are often stretched thin after covering supplies or subcontractors, and financial pressure can rapidly escalate when payouts are delayed, inaccurate, or subsumed by fees.
Unfortunately, all of these issues are common in the current payment system.
“The system itself was built by banks for banks, for their convenience and not for either end of the transaction,” Wester said. “It's not built for the sender. Tthe sender has to figure out the complexity, they have to figure out where it's going, and they have to figure out the cost. And the recipient, it's definitely not designed for them because they have to wait. They are the ones where often the fees are built into whatever it is that they received.”
Translating Speed into Trust
These payment challenges don’t align with current customer expectations. When users can send peer-to-peer payments almost instantly with full visibility in a seamless digital experience, traditional cross-border payment systems can feel archaic.
“They want settlement and they're even beginning to understand the differences between when a payment is made and when a payment settles,” Wester said. “They are expecting that settlement to be immediate. Nobody wants to wait for a payment to clear anymore, you don't want to hear that phrase. You just expect a payment to happen and the money to move and for it to be available in an account right away.”
For their part, many organizations want similar clarity on the other side of the transaction, since understanding cash flow is essential to operations. However, the complexity of cross-border payments—combined with managing multiple platforms, freelancers, and contractors—mak
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