What an International Invoice Actually Costs You
Most businesses have never done this arithmetic. It is usually worse than they think.
Your client in Singapore approves the invoice on Monday. The money reaches your account on Thursday, and it is less than you invoiced.
Most businesses treat this as weather. Something that happens to you.
It is not. It is a routing choice, and it is costing you more than you think.
Where the money goes
An international wire does not travel. Nothing moves. What happens is a series of messages between banks that do not fully trust each other, and each one takes a fee and a day.
The sending bank charges an outbound fee. Your client sees this. You do not.
Intermediary banks take a cut. Your bank probably has no direct relationship with your client’s bank, so the payment hops through one or two correspondent banks. Each takes a fee, deducted from the payment in transit. This is why the amount that lands is less than the amount invoiced, and why nobody can tell you in advance exactly what will arrive.
The FX spread. This is the big one and it is invisible. The rate you get is not the rate you see on Google. The difference is the spread, it is rarely disclosed, and on a large invoice it dwarfs every explicit fee combined.
Your bank charges an inbound fee for the privilege of receiving it.
And it takes two to four business days, longer over a weekend, longer again if anything gets flagged for review.
Do the arithmetic on yourself
Pull your last five international invoices. For each one, write down what you invoiced and what actually landed.
Most people have never done this. The number is usually worse than they expect, and it is worse still when you add the hours spent chasing payments and reconciling amounts that do not match.
What the alternatives actually give you
| Method | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| Cards | Fast to authorise, familiar to the payer. Highest headline rate, plus cross-border and currency-conversion surcharges, plus chargeback exposure that can arrive months later. On large B2B invoices the percentage becomes painful quickly. |
| Local bank rails (ACH, SEPA) | Cheap and reliable, but only within their own geography. Solves nothing for the client in Singapore. |
| USDC settlement | Removes the correspondent banking chain entirely. Settles on-chain, directly to a wallet you control, in minutes rather than days. No intermediary bank taking an unexplained cut, and no FX spread on the transfer itself, because the asset is already dollar-denominated on both ends. |
Being precise, because this is where most of this category oversells: that is USDC in your wallet in minutes, not dollars in your bank in minutes. If you need fiat at the end, there is still an off-ramp step, and it has its own cost. What you have removed is the three days and the four counterparties in the middle, and you can see exactly what the whole thing cost you.
There is also a network fee (gas) on-chain. It is small, and unlike the FX spread, it is visible.
The point is not the technology
It is that you currently cannot answer a simple question, which is what did it actually cost me to get paid, and with a settlement rail you can see, you can.
Invoicing in one place
SaturnShift puts cards, bank transfers, and USDC in a single platform. Send an invoice, let the client pay how they want, and reconcile all of it in one place rather than across four tools and a spreadsheet.
Card and bank payments run on Stripe rails, with onboarding and compliance through Stripe. USDC settles on-chain to a wallet you control. We are non-custodial and never hold your funds.
Send us your last five international invoices and we will tell you what they actually cost you. No charge, and no pitch if we are not a fit.
USDC settlement times refer to on-chain receipt, not conversion to fiat. SaturnShift does not offer automatic USDC to fiat conversion.
Try SaturnShift today
Cards, bank, and crypto payments in one platform. See exactly what it costs to get paid.