Cross-border payments: From payment channels to a new era of digital services

“To go global, pave the way first.” Driven by both the global trade boom and the accelerated overseas expansion of Chinese enterprises, the cross-border payment sector is experiencing unprecedented development opportunities. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the Chinese cross-border payment market reached 7.5 trillion yuan in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% over the next five years. Against this backdrop, cross-border payment institutions such as Lianlian Pay, Yika, PingPong, CoGoLinks, and Xtransfer are no longer content with simply acting as payment channels, but are accelerating their evolution towards diversified scenarios, full-chain services, and global expansion. Actively obtaining overseas licenses is a crucial measure for cross-border payment institutions. Overseas payment licenses are the entry threshold for cross-border payment business. In recent years, cross-border payment institutions have been systematically expanding their global compliance networks, focusing on obtaining high-value licenses in key markets. In May 2025, Yika announced it had obtained a license from the MTL in Arizona, USA. Currently, Yika holds relevant business qualifications in multiple key markets including Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. Data shows that Yika’s overseas payment transaction volume in the third quarter approached RMB 1.3 billion, exceeding the total for the previous year. In May, PingPong officially announced it had received formal approval from the Central Bank of Malaysia. In June, PingPong received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates. Currently, it holds more than 60 payment licenses and permits globally. On May 8th, XTransfer announced it had obtained an electronic money institution license issued by the Central Bank of the Netherlands. This is another significant qualification XTransfer has obtained in the European market, following the API license issued by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. In November 2025, Lianlian Digital officially announced the establishment of its overseas headquarters in Hong Kong. “The Hong Kong headquarters will become Lianlian Digital’s strategic hub and cutting-edge innovation testing ground for its global reach,” Lianlian Digital stated. As of June 30, 2025, Lianlian Digital’s service coverage extends to over 100 countries and regions. Wang Pengbo, chief analyst at Broadcom Consulting, stated that obtaining licenses is a long-term, ongoing process, as institutions lacking licenses struggle to cooperate with local banks or conduct business from a compliance perspective. “From the perspective of Chinese payment institutions, with the domestic acquiring market largely settled, cross-border payments are an inevitable competitive path, and obtaining a license is a prerequisite for expansion,” Wang Pengbo said. It is understood that fees in overseas markets, especially emerging markets, are generally 3 to 5 times higher than in China. B2B large-value transactions and foreign exchange settlements offer more room for negotiation, and this profit margin is a core driving force for institutions going global. Su Xiaorui stated that geopolitics will impact the overseas business of payment institutions; therefore, acquiring as many licenses as possible is also a crucial consideration for cross-border payment institutions to diversify regional risks. The cross-border payment industry is undergoing a profound transformation driven by the evolving needs of sellers. Early institutions primarily focused on “low fees and fast payment,” but as sellers shift from simply “distributing goods” to “branding,” their demands for payment services have evolved to include end-to-end fund management and customized operational support. PingPong’s global integrated management solution supports front-end aggregated payment collection, mid-end fund aggregation, and back-end supply chain payments, enabling businesses to achieve visualized global fund management. Consumer brand Wallace has consistently pursued a “globally unified system” strategy since its overseas expansion. By establishing a global data center in China and deploying sub-nodes in key regions, it achieves flexible adaptation to multiple languages, time zones, and compliance modules. “In the payment process, the integration with PingPong’s globally unified interface greatly reduces the complexity and cost of communicating and connecting with local payment service providers in various countries one by one, making fund recovery safer and more efficient,” said Shi Shaoqing, CIO of Wallace. Lianlian Digital, relying on 66 domestic and international payment licenses, has built a full-process service system encompassing “collection, payment, remittance, and management.” As of June 2025, it had served 7.9 million merchants, and its global payment business saw a 94% year-on-year increase in total payment volume in the first half of 2025. CoGoLinks International has upgraded its digital services from basic collection and foreign exchange settlement to a “multi-scenario modular, customized solution” model. For example, a brand seller deeply rooted in the Brazilian market operates stores on three platforms simultaneously in Brazil, facing three major challenges: “dispersed fund management across multiple accounts, cumbersome overseas service fee payments, and high exchange rate volatility risks.” CoGoLinks International customized a proprietary solution for the company: First, it built a parent-child account system to help clients manage payments across various platforms and achieve automatic reconciliation; second, it enabled global direct payment distribution: supporting direct payments to platforms, advertisers, and logistics providers using account balances, avoiding exchange rate losses from multiple fund transfers; and third, it embedded a dynamic exchange rate management tool to help mitigate exchange rate fluctuation risks. “This significantly improved the company’s financial management efficiency, allowing them to focus more on store operations and supply chain management. By 2025, the brand had already doubled its revenue in the Brazilian market,” CoGoLinks International stated. From a regional perspective, emerging markets such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have become new hotspots for cross-border payment institutions due to rapid e-commerce growth and low digital payment penetration rates. The Southeast Asian e-commerce market has maintained an average annual compound growth rate of over 10%, the expansion of young consumers in the Middle East has generated substantial online transaction demand, and cross-border payment demand in Latin American countries such as Brazil and Mexico has surged with the influx of Chinese foreign trade enterprises. “The regulatory logic varies greatly across different markets,” shared a CoGoLinks representative. “We’ve assembled a professional collaborative team of local lawyers and financial regulatory experts in each core market, and simultaneously established a ‘global compliance platform’ to extract common compliance characteristics across markets, forming a reusable basic framework.” “The payment environment in emerging markets is not on the same level as in mature regions. Our core goal is ‘scenario research + rapid iteration,'” the CoGoLinks representative stated. In 2025, its Brazilian currency payment service achieved a compound monthly growth rate of 27.96%. The relatively weak financial infrastructure in some emerging markets is a major obstacle for businesses seeking payments. To address this pain point, XTransfer has innovatively launched a local payment account service. “Through this service, foreign trade companies can open local payment accounts in their target markets, allowing overseas buyers to directly complete payments using their local currency,” explained an XTransfer representative. Currently, XTransfer has served over 800,000 corporate clients, and its local payment accounts cover 80% of countries and regions globally, including Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Australia, and South Korea.