Ask the merchants trying to sell beyond their home markets, and the answer often comes back to infrastructure.
They would say that payments may look simple at the point of sale, but the work behind it is not. They grow heavier with every new corridor.
Each market adds another layer of work behind the payment itself, and those hidden demands can narrow margins long before a business reaches meaningful scale.
Kozen Tan, CEO, Singapore of LianLian Global, sees the consequences of this fragmentation firsthand, particularly as businesses across the Asia Pacific reassess the financial infrastructure behind their global expansion plans.
Kozen Tan
“Payment security and compliance trust are no longer just back-office concerns — they have become key front-end factors that influence whether customers complete a purchase,” he said.
Those shortcomings increasingly show up in revenue performance.
With global cart abandonment rates often exceeding 70%, merchants can lose potential buyers quickly when payment experiences feel unfamiliar or fail to reflect local expectations.
Cross-border payment providers are now being judged less narrowly, especially as AI-powered capabilities move from concept to commercial reality.
Cross-Border Growth Still Breaks at the Infrastructure Layer. But Why?
The burden grows market by market, as merchants deal with more operational work behind the scenes before a payment ever reaches completion.
A business may find demand overseas and still struggle to make the economics work once the hidden costs of moving money between markets start shaping daily decisions.
Now, growth plans can look clean on paper, but the machinery behind international payments often determines whether expansion remains manageable.
LianLian Global enters the story through this less visible part of cross-border commerce.
Its platform is built around the work merchants often have to piece together when they expand internationally, covering the financial processes behind collections, payouts, foreign exchange and merchant operations.
The aim is to make expansion feel a little less fragmented.
A merchant that would otherwise manage several disconnected payment relationships can operate through a more consolidated structure, giving finance teams better control over how money moves between markets.
Smaller companies feel that difference most sharply, as reduced operational complexity gives management teams more time to build demand in new markets instead of wrestling with payments infrastructure.
Singapore’s Strategic Role in LianLian Global’s Southeast Asia Push
A model like that depends heavily on regulatory credibility, particularly in Southeast Asia, where payment habits and supervisory expectations can vary sharply between markets.
But why Singapore? Kozen explained that the Lion City gives LianLian a practical base for that work.
The licence gives LianLian a stronger foundation to support regional payment activity from one of Asia’s most established financial hubs, while also helping the company build trust with partners operating in neighbouring markets.
The licence given by Singapore also sits within a wider regulatory footprint.
LianLian holds 67 payment licences and related qualifications globally, a network Kozen Tan sees as central to how the company builds confidence with merchants and partners.
“Holding payment licenses in multiple countries and regions shows we fully meet local financial regulatory rules,” he pointed out.
Merchants entering unfamiliar markets often need reassurance before they commit to new payment arrangements.
Regulatory coverage can reduce uncertainty around onboarding and local service adaptation, while giving payment providers more room to serve different markets without weakening oversight.
In cross-border payments, trust has to travel with the money.
AI Moves Closer to the Core of Cross-Border Payments
Licensing also gives LianLian a foundation, but Kozen believes the next stage of competition will depend on intelligence built into the infrastructure itself.
“We believe that valuable fintech companies in the future must be AI-native.”
Throughout financial services, AI is moving from experimental projects into the operating core.
LianLian is applying that shift to the areas where cross-border merchants often lose time, including localisation and the preparation of market-ready materials.
The company’s Loop AI platform shows how that strategy is taking shape.
Built for cross-border merchants, the platform supports translation in more than 100 languages and helps businesses produce content for overseas markets faster than traditional workflows allow.
According to Kozen:
“Loop AI has helped merchants boost content production efficiency by dozens of times and cut operational labor costs by more than 50%.”
Faster production cycles can help businesses respond to local demand with greater speed, particularly when they do not have large regional teams on the ground.
The broader implication is that the future use of AI in cross-border payments may depend on the intelligence surrounding the payment flow, not only the movement of funds itself.
Merchants need infrastructure that helps them operate in unfamiliar markets while keeping payment flows reliable.
Preparing for Commerce Run by AI Agents
LianLian’s ambitions also reach into a more automated version of global commerce, where AI agents could take on a larger role in commercial decision-making and financial execution.
That future-facing strategy includes Agent Wallet, a product LianLian plans to launch for an era in which AI agents play a larger role in how businesses purchase, pay and manage value.
Kozen describes the shift memorably:
“We are shifting from ‘people looking for money’ to ‘money finding people’.”
The idea points towards machine-to-machine financial infrastructure, where intelligent systems can carry out payments on behalf of users or businesses.
At scale, that infrastructure could influence how companies manage liquidity and automated purchasing, making payment execution part of a wider system of intelligent commerce rather than a separate step after a commercial decision.
Payments To Move Closer to the Operating Layer
“We believe that payment companies in the future will evolve from cross-border payment specialists into AI-native builders of new global intelligent financial infrastructure,” LianLian Global’s CEO of Singapore highlighted.
Transaction speed and pricing still matter, although they no longer tell the full story for payment firms serving global merchants.
Sustained advantage will increasingly come from pairing regulatory trust with operational intelligence, especially as businesses look for providers that can reduce compliance and execution gaps.
LianLian’s strategy suggests a payment company trying to move closer to the operating system behind global commerce, supporting the work that surrounds the movement of money.
Where AI and Cross-Border Commerce May Be Heading
For all the talk about frictionless global commerce, cross-border payments remain stubbornly local in practice.
Each market brings its own rules and payment habits, while the cost of getting things wrong can be steep, especially for merchants without large compliance or finance teams.
That reality helps explain LianLian Global’s AI push.
The company is betting that payment infrastructure will need to become more intelligent to keep pace with the way businesses now expand, sell, and manage money internationally.
AI will not replace the discipline required in cross-border finance. If anything, it raises the bar.
Payment providers will need to prove that intelligence can support faster decision-making without weakening oversight, adding opacity, or leaving merchants dependent on systems they cannot properly interrogate.
Speed will still matter, but the stronger differentiator may be the ability to make cross-border commerce feel less brittle for the merchants relying on it.
LianLian now has to show that AI can deliver that resilience without adding another layer of complexity.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore based on images provided by LianLian Global.
