The local accounts — with accompanying individual IBANs — will enable fast-growth businesses to collect payments in countries across Europe and beyond on local payment rails.

Navro customers can now open business accounts in, among others, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland, as well as Australia and New Zealand, that are denominated in the local official currency, without needing an office or a business registration in-market.

Eddie Harrison, Navro’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, said: “Enabling international businesses to transact like locals is at the heart of the Navro proposition.

"The introduction of our local accounts allows businesses to operate with a truly local footprint and takes us one step closer to realising our vision. Whether our customers want to accept Euros in France, Zloty in Poland, or Francs in Switzerland, they can now get paid on local payment rails as we lay the foundations for them to chase commercial opportunities in new markets.”

Due to Navro’s unique payments curation approach, its local accounts eliminate many of the shortcomings associated with the use of conventional IBANs in cross-border transactions.

IBANs’ launched in 1997 as a standard format for European bank accounts aimed at facilitating simpler, faster cross-border transactions and reducing the risk of payments errors. However, despite being designed as an international standard, even today IBANs are often only functional on a domestic basis. IBAN discrimination — where a bank or business declines a legitimate payment from an account in another country — is prohibited by European legislation, but is nonetheless commonplace.

In other instances, differences in IBAN formats across countries can lead to unnecessary rejections. These are particularly common issues with multi-currency IBAN technology solutions.

Valid payments can be rejected for a variety of other reasons, including a lack of organisational awareness of legal responsibilities, varying national regulations and compliance requirements across markets that intrude on the payments process, and the need to manage the higher perceived risks of accepting foreign payments.

Navro’s payments curation solution — a new infrastructure approach that provides access to the best payment services in every region of the world through one platform, one API, and one contract — tackles this behind-the-scenes complexity to ensure that business customers can receive payments made in their name in local accounts, in local currencies, via local payments rails.

In addition to these capabilities, Navro also now offers business accounts in a range of major international currencies — including US dollars, Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen and United Arab Emirates Dirham — for firms operating outside those markets but who hold and trade those monies.

Eddie Harrison continued: “As we build out our payments curation platform, we’re giving our customers more control and flexibility over how they manage large volumes and complex layers of incoming and outgoing payments in multiple currencies. Our local and international accounts will lower costs, reduce the management burden and free up working capital.”

Navro’s collections capabilities build on top of its existing payout services, which enables customers to make payments in 130 countries in 200 locations across the globe.