A startup might begin with two founders and one bank account. Then it hires a developer in South America, rents coworking space in Spain, engages lawyers in another jurisdiction, starts accepting payments from European customers, and pays some contractors using stablecoins. The company is growing exactly as intended, but its financial operations can become more difficult to understand with every new market, employee, account, and payment method.
Anna Tobin, Business Development Lead at Performa, sees that fragmentation as an increasingly common problem for digitally native companies. With roughly 15 years of experience across fintech, startups, payments, banking ventures, digital assets, and Web3, she has watched companies gain the ability to operate globally much faster than their financial processes can adapt.
The problem Performa is addressing is not simply how to move money from one person to another. It is how a company keeps track of its financial activity when traditional banking, digital assets, international payments, invoicing, and reporting are all happening through separate systems.
Global Companies Build Financial Stacks One Problem at a Time
Few startups deliberately design a complicated financial operation. The complexity usually develops gradually.
A founder might initially use one platform for international transfers because it solves an immediate problem. Later, another service is added for invoicing. The company opens another bank account, begins paying some people in stablecoins, adds digital wallets, and starts working with vendors in several countries. Each decision can make sense on its own.
Eventually, however, the company has assembled a financial stack from tools that were never designed to operate as one system.
Tobin says that pattern appeared repeatedly during Performa’s customer-development conversations with founders, finance teams, and operations professionals. The difficulty was not always making the payment itself. Often, the harder task came afterward, when someone had to understand where money had moved, which account it came from, how it should be recorded, and how the activity fit into the rest of the company’s finances.
That becomes especially difficult for businesses operating across both fiat currency and digital assets.
Reconciliation Becomes an Operational Problem
A company might have multiple traditional bank accounts alongside several cryptocurrency wallets. Someone still has to bring those records together.
In smaller businesses, that responsibility can fall directly on a founder or an operations employee who is already managing several other parts of the company. Spreadsheets often become the connective tissue between systems, but manual processes require time and create more opportunities for mistakes.
Tobin has seen founders spend large portions of their day dealing with transfers or resolving banking problems. The immediate cost might be a fee or a delayed payment, but the broader cost is the attention taken away from customers, product development, hiring, and other work that only a small leadership team can perform.
Performa was built around giving those teams greater visibility. Rather than requiring a business to replace every financial relationship it already has, the platform is designed to bring information from existing business bank accounts and digital-asset wallets into a more unified environment.
The value is less about adding another financial account and more about making the accounts a business already uses easier to understand together.
For finance and operations teams, that can make reporting, transaction searches, and reconciliation less dependent on manually piecing together information from several places.
Stablecoins Add Another Option for Global Payments
Tobin also sees stablecoins as useful for companies that already operate internationally and are comfortable with digital assets.
Traditional cross-border transfers can involve multiple financial institutions, foreign-exchange costs, settlement times, and banking schedules. Stablecoins can offer another route for moving money across borders, particularly when a contractor or vendor is already prepared to receive them.
That does not mean every payment should move onto a blockchain or that traditional banking disappears from the picture. In practice, global companies often need both systems.
One employee may need to receive local fiat currency. A contractor may prefer stablecoins. A law firm may require a conventional bank transfer, while customers may be paying invoices through entirely different channels. The operational challenge comes from managing those different flows without losing sight of the overall financial position of the business.
This is why Tobin views reconciliation as more important than any single payment method. A company can add faster ways to send money, but if each new method creates another isolated set of records, the underlying management problem remains.
Financial Operations Have to Grow With the Business
Founders routinely ask whether their technology, sales process, or hiring strategy can scale. Tobin believes financial operations deserve the same scrutiny.
One warning sign is the amount of time required to complete routine financial work. If a founder is spending entire afternoons handling payouts, if contractors are waiting because a transfer has stalled, or if understanding the company’s finances requires opening several platforms and updating increasingly complicated spreadsheets, the business may have outgrown the process that worked when the team was smaller.
Payment problems can also become people problems. Employees and contractors expect to be paid accurately and on time, and repeated delays can undermine confidence in a growing company. Financial friction therefore has consequences beyond the accounting department.
Tobin’s larger point is that global ambition creates operational responsibilities that can be easy to underestimate. Hiring internationally and selling across borders may happen quickly, but the systems underneath those decisions still need to keep up.
Performa Started by Studying the Workflow
Performa’s approach grew from extensive conversations with the people actually responsible for company payments.
Tobin says the team asked founders, finance professionals, and operations employees how money moved through their organizations, how many accounts they managed, where time was being lost, and which parts of the process created the most frustration. They also asked what an ideal system would look like if existing technical limitations were removed.
Those conversations helped shift the focus away from building features in isolation. The underlying problem was the fragmented workflow itself.
That customer-development process also offers a lesson beyond financial technology. A company can spend considerable effort building what it assumes customers need, or it can examine how people are already solving a problem and identify where that process begins to break down.
For Performa, the recurring breakdown was clear. Global companies were gaining more ways to move money, but not necessarily better ways to see and manage all of those movements together.
That distinction matters because financial complexity tends to arrive gradually. A system that feels manageable with four people and two accounts may look very different with contractors, vendors, customers, currencies, and wallets spread across several markets.
Founders do not need to wait for that complexity to become a crisis before examining it. The more useful question is whether the financial process that works today can remain understandable as the business becomes more global tomorrow.
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