"We accept international payments" usually means "we accept international cards"
Which is a much smaller claim, and in several of the world's fastest-growing markets it is close to no claim at all. Selling across borders is three separate problems wearing one name: the method your customer actually uses, the currency you are charging in, and the settlement path that ends at an account you hold. Get two of the three right and you still lose the sale.
Method
What the customer reaches for. In much of the world that is not a card — it is a wallet, a bank transfer, a QR code or a phone balance. If it is missing they do not substitute; they leave.
Currency
What you charge in, which is not the same as what you settle in, which is not the same as what the customer's bank converts at. Three different numbers that teams routinely treat as one.
Settlement
Where the money lands and under whose name. This is the one with the paperwork — some markets are open to a foreign merchant through a provider with local acquiring, others expect a local entity.
What people actually pay with
A sample, not a directory. The full provider list is authoritative and filterable by market.
Nigeria & West Africa
Wallets, bank transfers, virtual accounts and USSD carry a large share of consumer payments, and card penetration understates real purchasing power badly.
- Paystack, OPay, Monnify, Moniepoint
- PalmPay, Paga, Kuda, Interswitch
- USSD and virtual accounts, not just cards
South Africa
Instant EFT is a mainstream checkout choice rather than a fallback, and QR payments are widely used in person and online.
- Ozow, Payfast, Stitch
- SnapScan and Zapper for QR
- Instant EFT alongside cards
East & Pan-Africa
Mobile money is the primary rail across much of the region, and a checkout without it is invisible to most of the market.
- Pesapal across East and Southern Africa
- DPO Pay pan-African
- SeerBit and Fincra for multi-country coverage
Europe
Bank-redirect methods dominate specific countries so completely that offering only cards reads as a foreign site.
- iDEAL in the Netherlands
- Bizum in Spain, Bancontact in Belgium
- Klarna for pay-later, Revolut across the UK and EU
India, MENA & South Asia
Real-time account-to-account rails have moved faster here than anywhere, and cards are a minority of consumer volume in several of these markets.
- Razorpay for UPI and netbanking in India
- PayTabs and Tap Payments across MENA
- SSLCommerz in Bangladesh, Tpay across MENA and Africa
Everywhere: crypto
The only method on this page that does not care which market the customer is in — and the only one that cannot be charged back.
- OxaPay, BitPay, Binance Pay, Quidax
- Settles to you without holding crypto
- Useful where card rails are unreliable
The currency question, stated precisely
Three distinct decisions get collapsed into "do you support EUR?", and separating them prevents most of the confusion:
- Presentment — the currency the customer sees. Showing a price in a currency they do not think in costs conversions before the payment is even attempted.
- Processing — the currency the provider will actually accept. A provider that cannot process the currency you are charging in will decline, and that decline looks to your logs like a card problem.
- Settlement — the currency that arrives in your account, and the spread applied to get there. This is priced by the provider, and it is where the real cost of cross-border sits.
Worth being exact about the division of labour here: an orchestration layer decides which provider handles a payment in a given currency. It does not perform the conversion — the provider or the customer's bank does, on their terms. So when you compare providers on cross-border cost, you are comparing their spreads, and no layer above them changes that number.
The failure this causes at checkout has its own page: why your checkout says "payment method not available for your currency".
The approval-rate tax nobody itemises
A cross-border card transaction is scrutinised harder than a domestic one by everyone in the chain. The same card, the same customer and the same amount can be approved locally and refused when presented from abroad, and none of that shows up as an error you would investigate — it arrives as an ordinary decline.
Which makes local acquiring a revenue decision rather than a coverage one. Presenting a payment through a provider that acquires locally in the customer's market is the single change that most reliably moves the number, and it is the mechanism behind most of improving your approval rate.
A sane order of operations
Expanding market by market beats enabling everything, and it is measurable at each step.
- Find where you are already losing. Look at checkout abandonment and decline rate by country. The markets worth fixing are the ones with traffic and no conversions.
- Name the method, not the provider. Decide that you need UPI, or instant EFT, or mobile money. Then pick a provider because it offers that, rather than picking a provider and discovering what it offers.
- Check the entity requirement early. Whether a foreign merchant can offer that method at all is a business question with a long answer, and it should not surface after the integration work.
- Enable, then measure that country alone. Aggregate numbers hide a market-specific win completely.
- Repeat for the next market. Not all of them at once — each addition should have a reason you could state.
How PaymentHood fits
PaymentHood is what makes step five cheap. Your checkout integrates once, and 30+ providers — global, regional and crypto — sit behind it, so entering a market means enabling a provider and writing a routing rule rather than commissioning another integration. Payments are routed by currency, so the customer is put in front of a provider that can actually process what you are charging.
Every provider account stays contracted in your own name, and funds settle directly from that provider to you — PaymentHood is not a processor, an acquirer or a merchant of record, takes no percentage and no per-transaction fee, and never holds your money. If a provider you need is not in the directory yet, we integrate it at no cost.
Open the next market without another integration
Create a free account, browse the directory for your market, and enable the methods your customers already use.