Getting Paid Across Borders: LATAM Workers Expect More Than Transfers

Since 2020, the G20 has set concrete targets on cross-border payments around speed, cost, and fee visibility. While progress has been uneven, it’s clear that opacity and delay are no longer acceptable in international money movement.

These changes aren’t just felt by banks and financial institutions, but by millions of people who live in one country and earn income from another. As U.S companies continue to hire talent across Latin America (LATAM), the way money is delivered to workers has become a defining part of the employment experience. Expectations shaped by consumer fintech are colliding with legacy cross-border infrastructure that struggles to support high-frequency payments to distributed talent across multiple LATAM markets.

In LATAM, these shifts didn’t begin overnight. Consumer payment systems moved first. Government-backed instant payment rails and mobile-first financial apps normalized real-time settlement and immediate confirmation long before similar expectations reached cross-border employment. As a result, workers increasingly judge how they are paid through the same lens they use for everyday financial services.

What used to be a back-office function is now considered one of the most visible expressions of how effectively a company operates across borders.

Transparency Becomes the Baseline, Not a Feature

For years, transparency in cross-border pay was treated as a secondary concern. As long as funds eventually arrived, the details of how they moved, including fees and FX rates were rarely questioned. But that approach is no longer viable.In 2026, transparency is tested not by what employers intend to disclose, but by what workers can independently confirm. In LATAM, workers increasingly expect their pay to be immediately legible: what was sent, how it was converted, and what arrived, without relying on customer support or reconciliation across systems.

Yet, friction is still common. The Global Payroll Payments Report 2025 found that there were FX discrepancies in 18% of transactions. When that information is fragmented across employer systems, bank apps, and payout confirmations, transparency fails even if every step was technically processed ‘correctly.’

In many cases this stems from legacy payment structures. FX losses are hidden inside spreads rather than disclosed clearly. For instance, a five percent FX spread on a $2,000 monthly payment may seem marginal on its own, but over a year it represents more than $1,200 in a worker’s lost income.

Furthermore, complexity compounds the problem. Payment flows are layered: one system calculates compensation, another handles currency conversion, and another delivers funds locally. Each handoff decreases visibility. Workers struggle to verify outcomes and companies find it harder to explain or defend the payment process. By contrast, when FX conversion and local settlement are handled within a single, transparent workflow, disputes are reduced because workers can see what was sent, what was converted, and what arrived.

What was once tolerated as inefficiency is now becoming a trust issue and regulatory concern. Across LATAM, expectations around documentation and digital records are tightening, while workers themselves are more informed than ever about exchange rates and hidden fees. When transparency breaks down, trust erodes long before any regulator steps in.

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Why Cross-Border Payouts Still Lag Real-Time Expectations

In many LATAM markets, near-instant settlement isn’t considered a premium, but assumed. Domestic transfers clear in mere seconds, but cross-border payouts lag behind these expectations.

At the core of the issue is structural fragmentation. Real-time payment systems were designed for domestic use and rarely interoperate across borders. As a result, international payouts still rely heavily on legacy rails such as SWIFT and corresponding banking networks.

These systems introduce sequential handoffs, time-zone-dependent cut-off times, and batch processing windows that make real-time settlement impractical. A payment initiated on Friday in the U.S., for example, may miss local cut-off windows in LATAM, triggering settlement delays even when funds are available. Added on top are overlapping regulatory requirements, including AML and FX rules that vary by jurisdiction and must be satisfied before funds can move.

While nearly 70% of cross-border payments are credited within one day, only about one-third are credited within an hour. Additional operational friction such as recipient identity verification and cross-jurisdictional compliance checks still add measurable delays, especially as companies scale teams across multiple countries simultaneously.

Yet, what many businesses don’t realize is not everything is out of their control. For instance, platforms that enable local settlement can often reduce delays by avoiding unnecessary correspondent banking steps, even when true real-time settlement isn’t possible. This could mean designing payout flows around stable settlement currencies, like the U.S. dollar, and regulated banking infrastructure that can bridge jurisdictions more directly.

As LATAM’s domestic rails continue to mature, the gap between local payment expectations and cross-border payout reality becomes more visible—especially when legacy ACH-era timelines persist in the background.

Faster delivery comes from better architectural decisions, not demanding more speed from broken rails.

Compliance Is Increasingly Data-led

As cross-border work expands, compliance across LATAM is becoming more standardized, more digital, and far less tolerant of ambiguity. Regulatory reforms across markets, including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru, are tightening expectations around worker classification, documentation, and ongoing reporting.

One persistent misunderstanding is the assumption that ‘contractor’ status carries the same meaning across borders. In reality, several LATAM jurisdictions are narrowing the definition and strengthening tests around economic dependence, continuity of work, and degree of control.

Digital reporting systems such as Brazil’s eSocial and Mexico’s CFDI invoicing system have significantly increased the volume and accessibility of employment and payment data available to authorities. Thus, compliance is no longer enforced primarily through audits after the fact, but through continuous data visibility.

Automation and AI can help in managing this complexity. They can support identity verification, fraud detection, AML monitoring, and compliance reporting across jurisdictions, but only when applied with care. They can also flag anomalies in payment patterns or worker records, so issues can be resolved before they escalate.

Problems arise when automation is left unchecked. Classification judgments made without local legal context or tools that process sensitive worker data without sufficient oversight can introduce new risk rather than reduce it. Compliance is strongest when systems make processes easier to explain and weakened when they obscure how decisions are made.

How people are paid rarely attracts attention when it works. But as companies hire across borders at scale, pay becomes a large part of the equation. Domestic instant-payment systems have updated expectations, while regulators in LATAM are demanding clearer records and accountability. Cross-border payouts are no longer insulated from the broader changes reshaping global payments. For workers, predictable, legible, and trustworthy access to income is not a perk, and for companies competing for talent across LATAM, the ability to deliver that experience is a significant differentiator.

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