First of all, speaking of drawbacks, authenticity and compliance are still the biggest shortcomings of third-party payment institutions. First, since cross-border e-commerce transaction information is transmitted in electronic form, and electronic documents can be easily tampered with without leaving any traces, paperless and virtualization have led to difficulties in verifying the authenticity of transactions. Second, the model and capital receipts and payments of cross-border e-commerce are relatively flexible and scattered. For example, international logistics such as small packages and express delivery cannot obtain legal certificates such as customs declaration forms, and lack cargo flow data that matches the capital flow, which increases the difficulty of foreign exchange supervision. Third, cross-border business must not only comply with the regulatory requirements of relevant Chinese departments, but also take into account the laws and regulations, financial supervision and anti-money laundering policies of the local government of the target market. In terms of compliance operations alone, payment institutions have to spend money to purchase the anti-money laundering blacklists of many third-party institutions in order to meet international anti-money laundering requirements for cross-border business. However, with the liberalization of foreign exchange settlement business of payment institutions, there will inevitably be a small group of people who use virtual transactions, ant moving and other methods to launder money in disguise through payment platforms or transfer funds to and from China.
Secondly, due to the limitation of a single transaction of 50,000 US dollars and the current foreign exchange control system, third-party payment institutions generally do not involve cross-border B2B payment settlement. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange permits third-party payment institutions in the cross-border foreign exchange payment pilot to carry out B2C payment business, while B2B is still a business of traditional banks. Self-built B2B platforms can only realize online collection. The process of completing payment and foreign exchange purchase online is not perfect at present. In fact, most cross-border payments between enterprises are done offline. In addition, unlike the unified international practices of traditional international settlement (such as UCP600 and URC522), the cross-border payment rules of each e-commerce platform are formulated by their own platforms, and are modified from time to time, which requires sellers to pay attention to them in real time. For example, the logistics method must be the express delivery method specified by the platform (such as DHL, UPS, FedEx, etc.), and the logistics method that does not support sea transportation, etc. The collection time of different platforms is also different. Many platforms have set a buyer protection period and even set a “reserved payment”. This collection time regulation leads to a longer collection time for sellers, which affects the capital turnover speed of the payment.
Finally, third-party cross-border settlement channels are constrained by the limited influence of domestic institutions abroad. Overseas users are still accustomed to using credit cards, local banks or other local payment tools with high recognition, so application promotion is difficult. In general, even if the order transaction is completed online, the entire settlement system of B2B business is still very traditional and cumbersome. Due to the large amount of money, it is difficult to apply the usual “payment before delivery” method of e-commerce. It is still necessary to use traditional bank credit enhancement settlement such as letters of credit, factoring, T/T, etc., supplemented by contracts, invoices, customs declarations and other documents bank settlement, and the online settlement of international trade has not yet been realized.