Many companies expect gig workers to deliver fast, reliable work—but the way they’re paid often tells a very different story. Behind the scenes, payouts can lag days or even weeks, get chipped away by fees, and disappear into layers of currency conversion and compliance hurdles that most contractors never see coming.

This gap between real-time work and delayed compensation becomes even more pronounced in cross-border payments, where long-standing friction points persist: settlement delays, hidden costs, currency conversion, regional regulations, and limited visibility into where money actually is at any given moment.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, and James Wester, Director of Cryptocurrency at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the many ways in which leveraging digital assets for payouts can create a more effective solution.

Not only can crypto payouts address operational challenges, but implementing efficient global payout systems can also be a key differentiator when it comes to attracting and retaining vital talent in a competitive market.

The Operational Pain Points

The issues with cross-border payments only intensify as organizations scale high-volume international payouts. Although cost is often the most visible concern, many of these expenses are not immediately obvious.

“It’s not the payout itself that costs a lot, it’s the operational overhead that comes with this payout,” Lifshits said. “There are things like reconciliation, operational failures, and support tickets that come with failed payouts, and all kinds of manual operations are needed. If we’re talking about 100 payouts, it’s one fee. If we’re talking about 100,000 payouts, it’s another fee because at scale we’re talking about additional infrastructure.”

Understanding fee structures is just one aspect of the broader operational complexity facing finance teams at global organizations. These teams must manage multiple banks and fiat currencies while continuously staying current on regional regulatory, tax, and compliance requirements.

While this is challenging for organizations, payout inefficiencies can be even more detrimental for contractors. One of the biggest obstacles for small businesses—and especially freelancers, creators, and gig workers—is cash flow.

Budgets are often stretched thin after covering supplies or subcontractors, and financial pressure can rapidly escalate when payouts are delayed, inaccurate, or subsumed by fees.

Unfortunately, all of these issues are common in the current payment system.

“The system itself was built by banks for banks, for their convenience and not for either end of the transaction,” Wester said. “It’s not built for the sender. Tthe sender has to figure out the complexity, they have to figure out where it’s going, and they have to figure out the cost. And the recipient, it’s definitely not designed for them because they have to wait. They are the ones where often the fees are built into whatever it is that they received.”

Translating Speed into Trust

These payment challenges don’t align with current customer expectations. When users can send peer-to-peer payments almost instantly with full visibility in a seamless digital experience, traditional cross-border payment systems can feel archaic.

“They want settlement and they’re even beginning to understand the differences between when a payment is made and when a payment settles,” Wester said. “They are expecting that settlement to be immediate. Nobody wants to wait for a payment to clear anymore, you don’t want to hear that phrase. You just expect a payment to happen and the money to move and for it to be available in an account right away.”

For their part, many organizations want similar clarity on the other side of the transaction, since understanding cash flow is essential to operations. However, the complexity of cross-border payments—combined with managing multiple platforms, freelancers, and contractors—makes it difficult to track cash flow accurately.

This creates a difficult environment, because organizations that rely on gig workers and contractors at scale understand that speedy, reliable payouts are the lifeblood of their business model.

“In this case, speed translates into trust and reputation and that in its turn translates into bigger volumes, because speed means that the users will trust this provider or this business—whichever is sending the payouts—and that in its turn will bring in more usage,” Lifshits said. “It all goes together.”

Improving the Economics of Global Payouts

As merchants increasingly recognize the importance of efficient payouts, many also acknowledge that current cross-border payment systems fall short of expectations.

Digital assets can provide near real-time payment and greater transparency, while often reducing currency conversion friction and regulatory overhead. Perhaps most importantly, crypto payments can help reduce the spiraling costs of global payouts.

“It’s different with crypto payment gateways because they can help scale without ballooning the fees. The fees stay the same even with a big scaling,” Lifshits said. “All the pain points could be dealt with in this traditional infrastructure, but it will cost very, very much. But if it’s a crypto payout infrastructure, the fees will be what they are supposed to be in a world that makes sense.”

At the center of this infrastructure is the crypto gateway, which bridges payments processors and merchants. While early crypto gateways were little more than a “Pay with Crypto” button at checkout, modern systems have evolved into sophisticated payment orchestration platforms that optimize routing while maintaining compliance.

Crypto gateways have become essential for managing the many components of the digital asset ecosystem, including cryptocurrencies, wallets, integrations, and infrastructure layers. This is transformative for organizations that are drawn to the cost and efficiency benefits of digital assets but hesitant about operational complexity.

These gateways also address one of the most significant barriers to adoption: volatility. Crypto gateways allow merchants to choose how actively they manage digital assets, from fully automated conversion to more hands-on control.

All these advantages make crypto payouts as user-friendly as other payment tools in a merchant’s stack.

“Crypto is not something now that a business needs to look at and think that is different from the standard way of doing things,” Wester said. “It has become a standard for business-to-business payments, and it is not something that is strange or foreign or weird or exotic. It’s a standard tool for making payments and has become so very quickly.”

Changing Business Economics

Crypto has been adopted rapidly in part because it often offers a more efficient alternative to many traditional payment methods. However, the benefits of using digital assets for payouts extend beyond cost reduction.

“If you think about gig economy marketplaces or about any time there has to be a payout, when you think about making that payment better, faster, and cheaper, it becomes something that those businesses can now use as a competitive advantage,” Wester said.

While crypto gateways are powerful tools, they were not entirely fee-free—until now. NOWPayments recently introduced zero-fee payouts with near-instant processing for wallets within its ecosystem. This solution is designed for high-volume global operations and delivers meaningful improvements in efficiency and scalability.

Beyond reducing costs, NOWPayments introduces a new value proposition for partners: the ability to generat...