European SMEs Are Scaling Across Borders. Are Their Cards, FX and Controls Keeping Up?

More than six in ten European small and mid-sized businesses operate across multiple countries. Half also say entering new markets is their biggest strategic priority in 2026. But when it comes to how they actually manage spending, many are still relying on infrastructure that was originally designed for single-market operations.

In other words, there’s a gap between the ambition of the modern SME and the tools it uses. This is one of the most interesting findings in Wallester’s Corporate Spending Outlook 2026, which analysed €325 million in corporate card transactions across the EEA and UK and surveyed the SMEs behind them on how they manage cross-border spending.

New Markets, Same Old Wiring

The expansion drive is not difficult to understand. European integration, the growth of B2B e-commerce, and the relative ease of remote hiring have made cross-border operations accessible to companies that would never have attempted something similar a decade ago.

The problem is that the financial infrastructure behind those operations hasn’t exactly kept pace. For example, running a business across Germany, Denmark and Hungary simultaneously by definition means dealing with several different currencies, VAT regimes, varied supplier payment preferences, and teams that need spending authority without a finance officer looking over their shoulder all the time. While cross-border logistics have largely been solved, the money side has not.

85% Rely on Cards. Many Still Struggle to Track Spend

Credit and debit cards still dominate corporate spend. More precisely, 85% of respondents rely on them as a primary payment method. Invoice payments come in at 60%. The good news is that virtual cards, still relatively new as a mainstream tool, are already used by 55% of businesses surveyed.

Cards are flexible, fast and accepted almost everywhere. So for a team booking travel, paying a SaaS subscription or settling a vendor invoice, a card works where a bank transfer might take two or three days and require documentation.

But traditional corporate card setups at scale create their own problems, as cards get shared across a department without real visibility into who spent what, on what, and why. In practice, this results in finance teams reconciling expenses after the fact and correcting mistakes that could have been prevented in the first place.

The Card as a Control Mechanism

What’s behind this shift toward virtual cards? First of all, there’s a growing understanding that the card setup can perform the function of a security layer. For instance, issue a card, set its own rules, assign it to a project and lock it to a specific category. All this can be done in seconds. As a result, the card stops being just a payment instrument and becomes a spending policy made executable.

Wallester Business is built on this logic. Sign up for free, and your company can immediately issue 300 free virtual Visa cards, each with its own controls and limits.

For businesses that need to shuffle between multiple currencies, Wallester also handles FX exchange across 10 currencies, 24/7, with transparent rates and no service fees. Everything feeds into a single dashboard that syncs natively with Xero and QuickBooks, which stops month-end reconciliation from being a manual exercise spread across several portals and a spreadsheet.

The New Baseline

The headline figure – 62% cross-border – is not so much a statement about ambition as the new standard. International operation still is, of course, a growth-stage aspiration. But for many companies, it is also something that they simply already do. Another question is whether their financial infrastructure is built for that reality or for the much simpler, single-market one that preceded it. Luckily, for those still operating on the latter, the fix is no longer complicated. The tools are already there, and the next step is simply to put them to work.