When a person sends money to their family in another country, that’s a remittance. When an SME pays an invoice to its supplier abroad, that’s a cross-border B2B payment. They look alike — money crossing a border — but they live in different worlds, and understanding the difference explains why paying an invoice is still so expensive.
The remittance world: watched and improving
Remittances are a huge flow — on the order of US$905 billion in 2024, 4.6% more than the year before — and because of their social weight they have something corporate payments don’t: public price scrutiny. The World Bank publishes the cost of sending remittances across hundreds of corridors every quarter (Remittance Prices Worldwide), the UN set a target for that cost, and dozens of apps compete to drive it down. In Latin America the simple average cost is already around 3.7% of the amount sent.
It isn’t a perfect market, but it has a thermometer. And what gets measured goes down.
The B2B world: no thermometer
An importing SME’s payment — say between US$5,000 and US$200,000 per invoice — doesn’t qualify as a remittance and isn’t captured by any of those measurements. It goes through traditional banking, with its correspondent chain, its undisclosed FX spread and its intermediary charge that shows up later.
The average cost of that segment? The public figure doesn’t exist. Nobody tracks it corridor by corridor the way the World Bank does with remittances. Every company negotiates blind against its bank’s rate card, with no idea what anyone else pays.
What you can demand in the meantime
The gap doesn’t close by waiting for a report. It closes by demanding, on every payment, what the remittance world already made standard:
- The total cost before you confirm — exchange rate and fee separately, not one opaque number.
- Traceability — knowing where the payment is, not praying.
- Documentary backup — a receipt with the exchange rate applied, ready for your accounting and for the SII (Chile’s tax authority).
If your payments provider can’t give you those three things, that’s the signal.
Sources: Migration Data Portal — Remittances; World Bank — Remittance Prices Worldwide; The Dialogue — The State of the Remittance Industry (2025).