Traditional cross-border settlement mainly refers to international settlement tools such as remittance, collection, and letter of credit between banks. It relies on the mature SWIFT system and clearing system between global banks and has the characteristics of security, stability, and reliability. Driven by competition, major banks continue to optimize processes and improve services under the premise of controlling risks. The settlement cycle is much shorter than in the past. For large-scale cross-border trade, it is undoubtedly the safest and most reliable choice.
However, compared with new settlement tools, traditional bank cross-border settlement obviously has the disadvantages of complicated procedures, long cycles, and high costs, which makes it difficult to meet the cross-border business needs of small and medium-sized enterprises with “high frequency and small amounts”. In the field of cross-border e-commerce B2B, banks mainly provide funds settlement, foreign exchange management and trade financing support in accordance with traditional general trade methods; use their branches around the world to open overseas bank accounts (usually Hong Kong accounts) for large cross-border export sellers to provide global funds collection and payment and foreign exchange management services.
The online payment and settlement systems created by some banks with image pilot qualifications have an entrance for uploading scanned copies of export-related documents, which can be understood as the onlineization of banking services, but their cross-border payment settlement is temporarily separated from e-commerce platform transactions and goods delivery. As for cross-border e-commerce retail (B2C) enterprises that directly mail goods to domestic and foreign consumers through postal parcels or express delivery, if they do not go through general trade processes such as customs declaration and commodity inspection, banks cannot directly provide enterprises with capital inflow and outflow and foreign exchange settlement and sales services in accordance with foreign trade capital management regulations. They can only serve as cooperative banks of third-party payment institutions to make international balance of payments declarations and foreign exchange settlement registrations.