B2B Currency Exchange Without Fees: A Guide for Finance Teams

B2B currency exchange is one of the least visible yet most expensive parts of cross-border payouts. You approve an invoice, a provider converts and sends the funds, and somewhere between your account and your supplier’s bank, value leaks through FX spreads and fees.

This article focuses on payouts, not collections. You will see where FX costs hide today, how different provider models actually charge for B2B currency exchange on payouts, and how Bancoli’s multi-currency accounts, Global Payments Gateway, and invoicing tools can be used to push more volume into zero FX and keep the rest at a clear, competitive spread.

The objective is simple: treat B2B currency exchange without fees as a design goal for your payout architecture, then use that goal to make better decisions that benefit your business.

Where B2B Currency Exchange Costs Hide In Payouts

Most businesses see bank fees on their statements, but rarely see the full breakdown of B2B currency exchange costs per payout.

In practice, four elements drive most of what you pay: the FX spread versus the mid-market, per-payment and network fees, how pricing tiers are structured, and the currency you use to fund each payout.

1. FX spread versus observable mid-market rate

On any payout that involves conversion, the provider chooses a rate. That rate often differs from an independent mid-market reference, which is the midpoint between wholesale buy and sell prices.

If you take a sample of recent payouts and compare the applied rate with a trusted mid-market source at the same timestamp, you will usually find a gap. That gap, multiplied by the payout amount, is part of your B2B currency exchange cost. When combined across corridors and months, it can easily reach several percentage points of your total cross-border spend.

2. Per payment and network fees on cross-border rails

The second layer is per payment cost. International payouts may include:

• Outgoing wire fees on your side
• Network and lifting fees inside correspondent chains
• Extra charges for using specific schemes or payout methods

These are not always visible when you approve the payment. Sometimes they are deducted from the amount the supplier receives. The net effect is that your B2B currency exchange costs are a mix of FX spreads and fixed fees, which can be hard to track unless you rebuild them from transaction-level data.

3. Tiered FX pricing and volume thresholds

Many banks and fintech providers use tiered FX pricing for B2B currency exchange. The goal of this model is to provide the lowest possible spread, and final pricing depends on volume, corridor, and plan.

Typical patterns include:

• A free or reduced FX allowance up to a certain monthly volume
• Standard pricing that applies once that allowance is exhausted
• Corridor-specific markups that reflect local liquidity and risk

When this structure is understood and monitored, a finance team can route flows to make the best use of lower tiers and allowances.

4. Funding payouts from the wrong base currency

The final pattern is structural. Businesses often fund payouts from whichever account is convenient, not the one that minimises conversion.

Examples include:

• Paying a GBP supplier from a USD account, even though you already receive GBP revenues
• Funding EUR payroll from USD while you also collect significant EUR invoices

Each time this happens, you create an extra B2B currency exchange event, and in some cases, a double conversion, that adds cost without adding value. A more efficient approach is to hold working balances in one or more major “pivot” currencies, typically USD and EUR, and to concentrate collections and payouts through those accounts.

When you use multi-currency business accounts in this way, you can match inflows and outflows by currency and reduce the number of conversions required to fund your payouts.

How Providers Structure B2B Currency Exchange On Payouts

Once you understand where money is leaking, it is easier to evaluate provider models. Traditional banks, fintech multi-currency accounts, and payment gateways all handle B2B currency exchange differently, and each is suited to specific use cases.

How traditional banks handle B2B currency exchange on payouts

Most banks still rely on correspondent networks. Your payout moves from your bank through one or more intermediaries to the beneficiary bank. FX is usually priced at the bank’s own rate, which includes a margin over mid-market or interbank rates. Research and provider documentation often cite bank markups of 2% to 4% or more above mid-market rates for cross-border transfers, depending on currency and business profile.

The charging logic is straightforward from the bank’s perspective:

• FX spread is embedded in the rate offered to you
• Outgoing wire fees are applied per payment
• Intermediaries may charge lifting fees that reduce the amount received

Banks work well when you need broad coverage, complex financing products, and long-standing relationships. For B2B currency exchange on high-volume payouts, the process is often expensive and could be more transparent. Reporting is usually not designed to give you a clean view of effective FX costs by corridor.

Fintech multi-currency accounts in B2B currency exchange

Fintech platforms such as Wise, Airwallex, Revolut Business, and Bancoli give companies more transparent ways to handle B2B currency exchange than most traditional banks or payment gateways.

Common capabilities include:

• Multi-currency accounts that hold balances in several major currencies
• Access to mid-market or interbank-linked FX rates with a clearly stated margin or fee
• Volume-based discounts or monthly FX allowances for larger users

Wise uses the real mid-market exchange rate and then adds a corridor-based fee that often starts at a fraction of one percent for common pairs. Airwallex quotes interbank FX rates and then applies a published percentage markup that varies by product and region. Revolut Business typically offers a monthly free FX allowance per plan, then applies a visible markup once a customer reaches that limit.

Bancoli follows the same broad transparency model, but is organised around its Global Business Account and Global Payments Gateway.

The Global Business Account is a multi-currency business bank account that supports B2B currency exchange for payouts. From this account, you can send USD payouts to more than twenty currencies with zero FX Fees within each plan’s monthly allowance. Once that allowance is used, any additional volume on those flows is priced at a 0.5 percent FX fee.

The Global Payments Gateway completes the picture. Your customers pay you via ACH, SEPA, wire transfers, stablecoins, and network transfers. You attach these payment options to Bancoli invoices, which creates an Instant Checkout experience and settles incoming funds into your USD and EUR accounts. This combination of collection and payout tools lets Bancoli compete with other fintech multi-currency platforms while giving finance teams a focused way to lower FX cost on B2B payouts.

Which operations does this category suit best?

In practice, this category suits businesses that need:

• Better pricing than many banks on B2B currency exchange
• Clear separation of FX spread and transaction fees or allowances
• Tools and dashboards that support automation and reconciliation

Across all of these providers, every conversion still has an explicit price, whether that comes through a spread, a fee, or the use of part of an allowance. The finance team’s role is to understand these mechanics, decide when conversions should occur, use corridors that best fit them, and monitor their transaction costs as part of continuous improvement practices.

Payment gateways and B2B currency exchange for marketplaces

Payment gateways and marketplace payout platforms, such as PayPal or card acquirers, focus on enabling commerce and payouts over their own networks. FX is one component of a broader fee structure that combines processing, cross-border, and currency conversion charges.

A typical pattern is:

• A percentage-based processing fee for the transaction
• An additional cross-border fee is charged when the payer and payee are in different countries
• A currency conversion fee that includes an FX margin above the base rate

Public information and third-party analyses often show that when volumes grow and flows are mostly cross-border, the combined impact of these elements can reach several percentage points of the transaction value.

These solutions are attractive for:

• Fast onboarding into existing ecosystems
• Access to global buyers and marketplaces
• Occasional or low-volume international payouts where the absolute FX cost is modest

For sustained, higher volume B2B currency exchange on payouts, finance teams usually prefer setups where FX pricing is more granular and can be managed as a primary design parameter rather than as a side effect of a broader payment stack.

How to use Bancoli for B2B currency exchange on payouts

Bancoli reduces B2B currency exchange costs on payouts when you follow a simple sequence: open and verify your account, collect into the right currencies, then route payouts through the FX pricing bands that fit your volumes.

Step 1. Open a Bancoli Global Business Account

Start by opening a Bancoli Global Business Account. This account acts as a multi-currency business bank account and becomes the central hub for your B2B currency exchange on payouts.

Step 2. Complete the business verification flow

Submit the required company documents and complete the business verification flow. Once Bancoli approves the account, you can use the full set of collection and payout features.

Step 3. Fund your currency accounts and get paid with the Global Payment Gateway

After approval, you can fund your currency accounts to make immediate payouts or start sending invoices with payment method options to start collecting payments into your Bancoli USD or EUR business bank accounts:

• Use Bancoli’s multi-currency invoicing tool.
• Add Instant Checkout to each invoice by attaching payment options from the Global Payment Gateway. Offer customers ACH, wire transfers, stablecoin payments, and in-network payments as funding methods for those invoices.
• Optionally, offer early-payment discount opportunities to accelerate payments.

Incoming payments are settled into your Bancoli USD and EUR accounts. Over time, you build working balances in these pivot currencies, which you then use to fund cross-border payouts with fewer conversions.

Step 4. Send payouts using Bancoli FX pricing bands

From a USD-funded account in your Global Business Account, you can now send B2B payouts while controlling currency exchange cost:

• Use FX payouts without conversion fees at the interbank rate from USD to more than 20 currencies (including EUR, GBP, and other major and regional currencies) within the monthly FX allowance that comes with your plan.
• When your FX payouts exceed that monthly allowance, pay a 0.5% FX fee on the overage for those same USD-funded flows.
• For payout volumes that sit beyond the Zero FX Fees tier but qualify for Bancoli Super Saver corridors, use fixed FX fees of 1% or 1.4% on supported currencies, as published on the Bancoli pricing page. These fixed bands replace opaque spreads with known pricing on those additional corridors.

By collecting into USD and EUR, funding payouts from those balances, and routing flows through the Zero FX band, the 0.5% overage band, and the Super Saver corridors at 1% and 1.4%, you convert fewer times and pay a clear price each time you use B2B currency exchange on payouts.

B2B Currency Exchange Playbook For Payouts

The following playbook is designed to be implemented by a finance or treasury team over a few weeks. It turns the ideas above into concrete actions.

Step 1. Map B2B currency exchange exposure by corridor and provider

Ask your team to produce a three-dimensional view of the last three to six months:

• Corridors: payout currency and destination country
• Funding currency and account used for each payout
• The provider that processed the payment

For each corridor–provider pair, capture total volume, number of payouts and average ticket size. This shows where you actually pay for B2B currency exchange today and which flows justify redesign.

Step 2. Rebuild effective FX cost and time for each key corridor

For your largest corridors, calculate two numbers per provider:

• All in FX cost: difference between applied rate and mid market, plus all explicit fees, expressed as a % of payout value
• Time to funds available: business hours between instruction and when the beneficiary can actually use the money

Plot those points on a simple scatter chart: cost on one axis, time on the other. Corridors that sit in the “slow and expensive” quadrant are the first candidates to move to more efficient B2B currency exchange rails.

Step 3. Decide which obligations really need local currency

Sit down with commercial, procurement, and legal stakeholders and review your largest corridors:

• Identify contracts that require payment in local currency by law or negotiation
• Identify relationships where counterparties already price in USD or EUR, or would accept it if you offered better terms or faster settlement

Flows that do not require local currency give you the most flexibility. You can collect in USD or EUR and fund payouts directly from those balances without an extra conversion, or convert once at your chosen time instead of at the moment of each payout.

Step 4. Design your target architecture around pivot currencies

Use the corridor analysis to define a simple target state for B2B currency exchange:

• Which corridors you will fund from USD
• Which corridors you will fund from EUR
• Which corridors must still settle in local currency from a local account

Once you have this map, choose the rails that best support it. Multi-currency account platforms such as Bancoli can hold USD and EUR working balances and route payouts through clearly priced FX bands. Your objective is to ensure each corridor uses a rail with an explicit pricing model that matches how you plan to fund it.

At this point, you are no longer treating payouts as one-off decisions. You are defining a B2B currency exchange blueprint and assigning each provider a role inside it.

Step 5. Sequence the migration of payouts

Do not move everything at once. Sequence migration in a way that contains risk and maximises savings:

1. Start with corridors that are slow and expensive today but operationally simple, such as USD to major currencies, where a chosen provider offers Zero FX or very low FX fees in payouts to the currencies you need to pay to.
2. Move on to corridors where you can switch from local currency to USD or EUR funding without harming commercial terms.
3. Finally, evaluate whether any long tail corridors fit better into clearly priced FX tiers.

For each phase, predefine volume limits, test cases, and a review date. Treat the rollout as a structured finance project, then decide corridor by corridor where Bancoli or other providers add the most value within that plan.

Step 6. Install recurring governance on B2B currency exchange

Once the new architecture is running, you need governance to prevent it from drifting back to old habits. This applies whether you rely mainly on banks, fintech multi-currency accounts, payment gateways, or a mix of all three.

At a minimum:

• Build a monthly FX dashboard that shows volume, all in cost, and average time to funds for each corridor and each provider or rail
• Break out how much volume runs in clearly priced FX tiers (for example, zero FX, 0.5%, 1%, 1.4% bands) and how much runs outside any defined tier
• Track the share of payouts handled by banks, by fintech platforms, and by gateways so you can see where dependency and risk concentrate
• Set thresholds that trigger action, such as cost rising above a set % in a corridor, time to funds slipping beyond your target, or too much volume sitting in the most expensive tier

This governance turns B2B currency exchange into a managed category of spend rather than a residual line item. The mix of providers can change over time, but your dashboard, thresholds, and review cadence keep the economics visible and give the finance team clear signals on when to adjust routing, renegotiate, or switch rails.

Conclusion

B2B currency exchange does not live in a price list. It lives in the way you design your payout architecture.

When you see where spreads and fees appear, understand how banks, fintech multi-currency accounts, and payment gateways charge, and decide which corridors each provider should own, B2B currency exchange stops being a tax you discover after the fact. It becomes a line of spending you can plan, measure, and intentionally reduce.

The practical path is clear:

• Map where your payouts start and where they land
• Quantify all in FX cost and time to funds by corridor and provider
• Use multi-currency accounts and structured collection into pivot currencies such as USD and EUR to avoid unnecessary conversions
• Route flows through clearly priced FX tiers

Approached this way, B2B currency exchange without fees moves from slogan to design target. Platforms like Bancoli, along with other modern providers, supply the rails and pricing structures. Your finance team supplies the architecture and governance that decide how much of each invoice your business actually keeps.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I quickly assess whether my B2B currency exchange costs are too high?

Take one or two of your largest payout corridors and rebuild the effective FX rate for each. Compare the provider’s rate and all fees to a mid-market benchmark at the time of each payout. If the total cost is several percentage points of the payout amount, there is likely room to improve by redesigning providers and flows.

Why is it important to separate FX spread from per payment fees in B2B currency exchange?

The FX spread reflects how far your rate is from the mid-market rate. Per-payment fees reflect rail and network costs. You need both numbers to compare providers fairly. A provider with a small spread but high fixed fees can be more expensive for small, frequent payouts than one with a slightly higher spread and lower per-payment cost.

How does Bancoli’s Zero FX Fees model compare to typical fintech FX pricing?

Many fintech platforms charge a transparent percentage spread on B2B currency exchange, typically between a fraction of a percent and around 1%, and may also charge fees for international transfers. Bancoli uses a different model for USD payouts to more than 20 currencies: zero FX conversion fees within a monthly allowance, and a 0.5% FX fee on overages. When you design your flows to leverage that structure, your effective cost can be significantly lower than with typical alternatives.

Can I use Bancoli only for B2B currency exchange-sensitive payouts and keep my main bank?

Yes. Many businesses maintain their primary bank relationships for domestic operations and credit, and use Bancoli as a specialised layer for B2B currency-exchange-sensitive payouts. You can move specific corridors or supplier groups onto Bancoli, take advantage of multi-currency accounts and Zero FX Fees, and leave other activities with your existing banks.

How often should I revisit my B2B currency exchange architecture?

A quarterly review is a practical baseline. At each review, confirm that your largest payout corridors still route through the most efficient provider, that you are using Bancoli’s allowances and multi-currency capabilities as planned, and that your all-in B2B currency exchange cost per corridor is trending in the right direction. If your business model or geography mix changes, revisit sooner.