Fear often leads to knee-jerk reactions. When uncertainty rises and panic sets in, many jump at the first solution that comes to mind, regardless of future consequences.
Businesses are not immune to such panic-driven responses. CFOs may have years of experience under their belt, but they’re ultimately still human, and fear can still affect decisions made by even the most experienced business leaders. Amid times of economic stress and uncertainty, it’s easy to slip into ‘panic financing’: slashing budgets, halting investments, and cancelling projects in a desperate bid to improve cash flow.
While such steps may provide temporary relief, they risk destabilising a business at the very time when greater resilience is needed. A financial strategy that rests on panic financing isn’t a solid foundation at all.
Rather than rushing to slap on band-aid solutions, smart CFOs will spend time understanding and healing the source of their financial pain. For many businesses, a dysfunctional payment system is a major factor. Payments optimisation may sound like a secondary concern, but it’s the infrastructure underpinning a business and friction and unmanaged costs can quickly take their toll. Making payments more strategic, seamless, and cost-effective is critical for future-proofing a business, allowing a company to ride out short-term uncertainty and maximise growth for years to come.
Payments determine whether hard-won customer demand turns into cash. When your payments strategy underperforms, revenue leaks through false declines, high cross-border fees, slow settlement, and poor customer experience. For mid-market and enterprise organisations alike, even small inefficiencies compound across thousands of transactions.
Payment delays, lost revenue, false declines, and payment leaks all create significant opportunity costs, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). For these businesses, inefficient payments can spiral into something much more nefarious than just operational issues; they can mean the difference between seizing growth opportunities and missing them entirely.
Payment costs also directly influence pricing decisions, which in turn affect a business’s ability to compete globally. The companies that thrive are those that optimise their payment operations rather than simply absorbing these costs into their pricing models.
CFOs who succeed in today’s competitive landscape are those who turn payments into business advantage. When payment systems are optimised, businesses can turn financial pressure into opportunity, gaining efficiency, reducing costs and improving performance, thereby becoming more resilient to economic challenges.
Reducing transaction fees, eliminating hidden costs like conversion charges and intermediary commissions, and accelerating settlement times can all unlock significant value. Real-time or next-business-day settlement enhances cash flow, while modern solutions such as Virtual Bank Account Numbers (VBANs) improve speed, transparency, and cost control.
When payments are treated as a strategic lever rather than a back-office expense, CFOs can boost their companies’ profitability, improve competitiveness, and position them for sustainable growth.
One area that CFOs typically neglect is cross-border payments. Hidden friction, high fees, and poor authorisation rates can create invisible revenue leaks. For companies operating internationally, this is a significant economic risk.
Businesses expanding internationally often overlook local payment methods (LPMs). With emerging markets bringing new revenue but also complex local preferences, many CFOs dismiss these as an operational burden. Ignoring LPMs and local currencies, however, risks checkout abandonment, as customers are more likely to abandon their carts if their preferred payment option isn’t available, ultimately stunting growth.
There are many methods CFOs can employ to make cross-border payments less of a hassle to implement, but also accessible to local customers:
Offer a localised checkout experience – Present the checkout page in the consumer’s language, display the local currency and offer the correct LPM on the checkout page.
Leverage local payment rails – Reduces processing times and transaction costs, enabling faster payments and freeing up resources for other priorities.
Transparent foreign exchange and fee structures – Builds trust with consumers and eliminates hidden costs that affect your bottom line.
Real-time and next-day settlement options – Strengthens an organisation’s cash position and also makes it more predictable.
If CFOs integrate the right technology into their payments processes and increase transparency, they’ll find it easier to identify and solve the problems that are preventing them from boosting revenue. CFOs must not succumb to panic and react to problems; instead, they must be proactive and fine-tune each step of the payment process.
Instead of succumbing to panic financing – reactive belt-tightening that may create short-term stability but long-term stagnation – CFOs need to adopt a more innovative, more proactive mindset. That means taking a detailed, critical look at their payment infrastructure.
When payments are optimised, each transaction generates more value, compounding into significant revenue gains. Crucially, payment performance must align with business strategy to prevent revenue leakage and win back market share from competitors.
The objective is to close the gap between strategy and execution. This begins with understanding the revenue opportunity tied to improved acceptance rates, recognising what’s lost to better-performing rivals, and tracking these metrics over time. CFOs need to be able to quantify authorisation, acceptance costs, and days-to-cash by market and method so that they can manage them.
Panic financing may feel like a useful action: a quick response to a time of fear and uncertainty. But, as we’ve seen, it can work to a company’s detriment. Building real resilience – and panic-proofing a business from future economic stress – relies on longer-term solutions that seek to remove embedded frictions and create crucial opportunities for lasting growth.
Brian Gaynor, VP Product & European Chief Executive, Bluesnap
“Forget panic financing – it’s time to panic-proof with a new payments strategy” was originally created and published by Electronic Payments International, a GlobalData owned brand.
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