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Why month-end takes so long
Step 1 — Connect every account
The headline numbers
Across 4.1M payments, the median cross-border transfer settled in 1.4 days. The fastest quartile of teams settled in under four hours, on the same rails and in the same currencies.
Where money gets stuck
Most delay isn’t in the banking network at all. Sixty-two percent of the time a payment spends in flight is spent waiting for a person to approve it.
Jonas Weber · KAFO
What the fastest teams do
Approve inside the tools people already use
Set limits per vendor rather than per payment
Batch payouts on a fixed weekly rhythm
What to do next
Pick your slowest payment type, measure its approval time for a month and remove one step. That single change moved the median team into the top half of our data set.
💡
Tip: track approval time separately from settlement time. They have different fixes.
Keep reading
Guide
How to close your books in 11 hours, not 5 days
A step-by-step playbook from finance teams that moved reconciliation to real time — without hiring.
Jonas Weber
6 min read
Product
Multi-entity accounts are here
Run every subsidiary from one login with shared approval rules.
Mei Tan
4 min read
Finance ops
The hidden cost of FX margins
Why a 1.5% spread quietly eats your runway — and how to stop it.
Anna Becker
5 min read
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