Luke Voiles is CEO of Pipe, a fintech company that helps small- and medium-sized businesses get access to capital and financial tools, often embedded inside software platforms they already use.

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Ambition isn’t fintech’s problem. Expansion is. For every breakout like Revolut or Stripe, dozens falter when they step outside their home market. New markets promise growth, but too often they deliver delays, ballooning costs and fatigue. The real challenge is building a scalable model for global growth.

It feels counterintuitive. The opportunity is clear, customer appetite is proven, and capital remains available for scalable ideas. But when it comes to execution, even well-funded fintechs make the same mistakes over and over. And the end result is usually the same: ballooning costs, delays, greatly reduced return on investment and growing reluctance and less support for future launches.

At Pipe, as we’ve launched our product into Canada and the United Kingdom, with more markets lined up, we’ve been able to create a global expansion playbook that empowers us to get up and running in new markets quickly, and launch the right way.

Where expansion plans go wrong

1. Rebuilding from scratch, every time
The most common trap is treating each market as a brand-new project. Teams get stuck spinning up new codebases, risk engines and compliance workstreams for every geography. This multiplies complexity across the organization, creates fragmentation in customer experience and leaves leadership wrestling with rising tech debt and resource fatigue. Instead of adapting, companies are duplicating. And they’re paying for it in every sense.

2. Scaling operations linearly
The second trap is operational: hiring entire armies of local compliance professionals, customer support agents and operations managers before a single customer is onboarded. While well-intentioned, this approach gobbles operating expenses and adds friction to scaling. Early teams spend months figuring out local nuances that should be handled by flexible systems rather than headcount, the net effect being that initial expansion becomes a cost center, not a growth driver.

3. Treating funding as an afterthought
Even when products and teams are ready, capital often isn’t. Too many fintechs patch together treasury relationships and banking partnerships or start thinking about cross-border liquidity strategies only after launching in new markets. The outcome: product offerings sit idle, go-to-market momentum is lost and first-mover advantage slips to nimbler competitors. All the while, the firm’s balance sheet bears unnecessary risk and opportunity cost.

Taken together, these missteps create a familiar scenario: long lead times, seven-figure launch budgets and ultimately, expansion fatigue. Ambitious plans get scaled back or shelved altogether, not for lack of vision, but because the underlying approach doesn’t support sustainable, efficient scaling.

Rethinking global strategy

Fortunately, there’s a new expansion playbook to lean on, built for the realities of 2025, not the challenges of a decade ago. The best operators today aren’t just relying on tools and infrastructure either; they’re benefiting from a whole new mindset.

1. One core, adaptive framework
Leading fintechs are moving away from duplicative, market-by-market architecture. Instead, they’re investing in a central, highly adaptable “core brain.” This is a single codebase that can ingest market-specific rules, requirements and workflows as data, not as hard-coded exceptions. Compliance, product and licensing logic are pulled into configuration tables, dramatically simplifying updates and reducing go-live times.

The upshot? Greater product consistency across markets with fewer surprises for both customers and compliance teams.

2. Automation-driven operations
World-class operators no longer default to manual hiring and training as their expansion lever. By leveraging AI-powered support and policy automation, they can handle a lot of legal, compliance, and customer needs algorithmically. They can then augment that with local staff that bring their understanding of cultural nuances to the table, and allow for high impact, in-market adaptations. To start, many local operations can be automated, easing the load of repetitive support tickets or regulatory grunt work. This makes entry both more agile and aligns your cost-base to real market traction.

3. Product readiness from day one
Perhaps most critically, the best fintechs know how they need to operate the local payment rails and work smartly to get money moving before market launches. With banking partners, capital needs and multi-currency strategies negotiated in advance, launching becomes a lever for early momentum, not a bottleneck. Product offers are immediately actionable, integration partners face no onboarding lag, and early customers experience real value from day one. Growth becomes a function of market demand, not organizational readiness.

How to avoid common pitfalls

For fintech operators eyeing international growth, the advice is clear:

Don’t let legacy thinking force you into unnecessary rebuilds. Design for adaptability at its foundation.
Automate where possible, especially with support and compliance.
Secure your funding before launch, not after.

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International expansion isn’t easy, but it shouldn’t be as impossible as it can currently feel. Those who can rethink both their existing platform architecture and operating model assumptions will be poised to outscale their competitors and avoid the costly missteps that have tripped up so many before.