What is VirtuaBroker? Cross-Border Payments, Explained

VirtuaBroker is a cross-border payments company that helps businesses move money across borders faster, more transparently, and at lower cost than the traditional banking route. This is the story of who we are, what we do, and why we believe businesses deserve a better way to move money across borders.

Doing business internationally has never been easier. A company in Barcelona can work with suppliers in Asia, hire people in Latin America, sell to customers across Europe and manage operations across several currencies, often without ever opening a physical office in those markets. However, moving money between those same countries can still be surprisingly complicated. International payments can involve multiple banks, different payment networks, currency conversion, compliance checks, local cut-off times and varying settlement schedules.

For businesses, the result is payments that take longer than expected, limited visibility once funds have been sent, and finance teams spending time chasing transactions that should have been straightforward. That gap, between how global businesses operate and how global money moves, is one of the reasons VirtuaBroker exists.

Traditional cross-border payments were built around a world where international transactions were less frequent and banking relationships were highly local. Today, that looks very different.

• A remittance provider may need to move money across several markets every day.
• A payment service provider may need access to multiple currencies and settlement routes.
• An importer may need to pay suppliers in several countries while maintaining visibility over cash flow.
• A travel company may need to settle with hotels, operators or partners across multiple destinations.

The underlying requirement is the same: move money across borders reliably, understand what it costs and know when it will arrive.

What is VirtuaBroker?

VirtuaBroker is a modern cross-border payments company. We build the infrastructure that lets businesses move money internationally, paying and getting paid across borders, without the delays, hidden costs and guesswork that come with the traditional banking route.

Most of our work sits behind the scenes. We provide the payout and settlement infrastructure that fintechs, payment providers and remittance companies rely on to move money across borders at scale, and that businesses use to pay suppliers and partners in other countries, such as imports and exports, payroll teams and the travel industry. If you have ever sent or received an international payment through one of their services, infrastructure like ours may well have been part of what made it happen.

We are not a bank, and we are not trying to be. Banks do many things well. Moving money across borders quickly, transparently and affordably has not traditionally been one of them, and that is the specific problem we exist to solve.

Why are cross-border payments still so difficult?

For all the progress in digital payments, sending money across a border can still feel like stepping back in time. A domestic transfer arrives in seconds, but an international one can take days.

The reason is the route the money takes. When your bank does not hold an account in the destination country, your payment travels through a chain of intermediary “correspondent” banks, each passing it along to the next. Every handoff adds three things: time, cost, and a loss of visibility. The result is a process that is slow, lacking transparency and expensive, and the data backs that up.

According to the Financial Stability Board (FSB)), which monitors cross-border payments for the G20:

• It is slow. Fewer than 45% of business-to-business cross-border payments settle within one business day.
• It does lack transparency. Even among payment providers that disclose the cost of a payment, only around 63% also make the expected speed clear. In Europe and Central Asia, roughly half of business cross-border payment services are not transparent about both cost and speed.
• It is expensive. Fees appear at more than one point in the chain, and foreign-exchange costs, usually the single largest component, are often marked up in ways that are difficult to see.

None of this happens because anyone is acting in bad faith. The rails were built for a slower, more local world. For a business operating across borders today, “that is just how international payments work” is an expensive answer to accept.

Here is the difference between the traditional route and modern payment infrastructure:

	Traditional bank route	Modern payment infrastructure
Speed	Often 2-5 business days	Seconds/Minutes to same-day
Route	Chain of correspondent banks	Direct, modern rails
FX cost	Marked up, often hidden	Shown upfront, closer to the mid-market rate
Fees	Applied at several points	Clear and consolidated
Visibility	Limited once the payment leaves	Trackable end to end

What does VirtuaBroker actually do?

We give businesses a faster, clearer and lower-cost way to move money across borders.

For companies that move money at scale, fintechs, payment providers and remittance companies, our payout API lets them add cross-border payments without building and maintaining a web of banking relationships in every market themselves. They connect once, and we handle the complexity of moving money across borders underneath.

Businesses that pay suppliers or partners abroad use the same infrastructure to collect in one currency and pay out in another, as our work with a Colombian coffee brand paying its growers shows. We continue to build tools that bring international payments and multiple currencies into one place, so finance teams can manage it all without juggling separate systems for every market.

Three principles guide everything we build:

• Speed. Money should move in seconds or minutes, not days.
• Transparency. The real exchange rate and the true cost should be visible before you send money, not discovered afterwards.
• Cost. Moving money across borders should not quietly erode your margin.

Who do we help?

Our focus is the businesses for whom moving money across borders is not a side task but central to what they do, and the businesses that lose real margin to the traditional route.

VirtuaBroker supports two broad types of customer.

1. Businesses managing international payments

For companies paying suppliers, managing treasury, operating internationally or working across multiple currencies. The focus is straightforward: simplify the movement of money between markets. That can include international supplier payments, treasury operations and multi-currency business payments. Some examples include freelance platforms with multiple international payouts, a local travel company in Spain that needs to pay tour operators in Zambia, or an Italian clothing brand paying suppliers in Asia.

1. Businesses building payment products

VirtuaBroker also provides payment infrastructure through APIs for companies that need cross-border payment capabilities inside their own products or operations. That includes businesses such as payment service providers, remittance companies, fintechs, neobanks and financial platforms.

Two examples show our range of services for both businesses managing international payments, and businesses that integrate our infrastructure with their own payment products.

Envia Dinero: opening the Europe-LATAM corridor for a remittance app

Envia Dinero is a Latin American remittance fintech built on a simple promise: sending money home should be fast, fair and affordable. To grow, it wanted to serve the large diaspora in Europe sending money back to LATAM, but that meant handling euro payments and European compliance its existing setup was not built for. Doing it alone would have meant pursuing European licensing and local banking relationships: a slow, costly path for a company that needed to move quickly.

Through a single API integration, VirtuaBroker gave Envia Dinero the European collection and cross-border routing it needed without building that infrastructure itself. Senders in Europe pay in euros through local payment rails; the funds are then routed to Envia Dinero’s payout partner in Latin America, which handles final delivery to the recipient. The corridor is built to move from collection to LATAM handoff in seconds, rather than the 2-5 days, typical of correspondent banking.

The result: 20+ new send countries live from one integration, more than €1M in monthly volume across 15,000+ monthly transactions, and 10,000+ new customers Envia Dinero was not able to reach before. Read the full Envia Dinero case study here.

Café Aromas: paying coffee growers at the pace of the harvest

Café Aromas, founded by Dailyn Valdivieso, brings single-origin coffee, grown by women producers in the mountains of Valle del Cauca, Colombia, to the Spanish market. It earns euros in Spain and needs to pay its growers in Colombian pesos, and for a brand built on returning value to those producers, every euro lost in the banking chain is a euro that does not reach the farm. Traditional euro-to-peso wires took 2-5 days and carried fees, plus an FX markup that quietly compressed margin on a premium, thin-margin product.

Now Café Aromas collects in euros and uses VirtuaBroker to convert and pay its producers in Colombian pesos locally. The platform handles the conversion and the cross-border leg, built to settle in seconds rather than days, so payments keep pace with the supply chain instead of holding it up. The conversion happens on the platform rather than through layered banking spreads, so more of each payment’s value reaches the coffee growers. The company now keeps around 4.2% of its annual supplier volume in the business. Read the full Café Aromas case study.

Different businesses, same principle: collect in one currency, pay out in another, and lose as little as possible to time and cost in between. We are extending that same foundation to more businesses that operate internationally.

Why did we build VirtuaBroker?

Because “slow, expensive, and lacking transparency” had become the accepted standard for something businesses do every single day.

We kept seeing the same pattern: a company builds a good product, wins customers in a new country, and then loses time and margin simply trying to get paid or pay a supplier. The payment, which should be the straightforward part, becomes the friction, and for too long, the only answer to the problem was to accept it.

We did not think that was good enough. The technology to move money across borders quickly and transparently exists. What was missing was a company willing to build it around the needs of the business sending the money, rather than the limits of the old rails.

So we built VirtuaBroker: not to replace anyone’s bank, but to fix the part that has been broken - moving money internationally.

Where we are headed

We are focused on doing one thing exceptionally well: moving money across borders in a way that is fast, transparent and affordable. As we grow, that means more ways for businesses to connect to our infrastructure, and more of the international-payments experience brought into a single place that’s efficient and easy to use.

We will keep sharing what we learn along the way, plain-English explanations of how cross-border payments really work, and where they are heading, here on the blog.

If your business moves money across borders, we would like to help. Get in touch with our team.

Frequently asked questions

What is VirtuaBroker?

VirtuaBroker is a cross-border payments company that helps businesses move money across borders faster, more transparently and at a lower cost than the traditional banking route, and provides the payout and settlement infrastructure used by fintechs, payment providers and remittance companies.

Is VirtuaBroker a bank?

No. VirtuaBroker is not a bank. We focus specifically on moving money across borders, the part of international business that traditional banking has served the least.

Who is VirtuaBroker for? We work with businesses that operate across borders, from fintechs, payment providers and remittance companies that move money at scale, to businesses paying suppliers and partners in other countries, from payroll departments to the travel industry.

How is this different from sending an international payment through a bank? A traditional international payment often travels through several correspondent banks, which adds time, cost and a loss of visibility. Modern payment infrastructure moves money over more direct rails, with the exchange rate and cost shown upfront and the payment trackable end to end.

How do I find out more or get started? Contact our team and we will walk you through how VirtuaBroker could work for your business.