Papaya Global – Payments & Exchange Rate Policy

7 November, 2023

Paying your global teams in their local currency doesn’t have to be difficult and complicated.  Here we’ll walk through how we make payroll payments worldwide, which currencies we support and how we calculate exchange rates.

How does Papaya pay my global teams locally?

  • The first step is for Papaya to send you your final payroll calculation, and for you to approve it.
  • Next, we’ll send you a request for funding, usually a few days before your team’s payday.
  • This funding request will specify the amount required; the date and time by which we need to receive the funds; the preferred currency you’ve selected to fund us in; and the account you’ll need to pay into.
  • We operate segregated bank accounts (‘Customer Money Accounts’) for all of our payments customers, and you’ll be able to see how much money is in your dedicated Papaya account at all times – in each funding currency if you use more than one.
  • After we’ve received your funds, when it’s time to make the payroll payments, we convert them into the required local currency and transfer the required amount to your team’s bank accounts.

What payment methods and currencies can I use to fund Papaya?

You can fund your team’s salary payments in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, HKD and SGD.  We plan to add further funding currencies over time, and we’ll update the list here as we do so.

How does Papaya calculate my exchange rate?

Because we hold payments licences in several markets, we’re able to integrate directly with multiple global banks, including JPMorgan and Citibank, so that we can access extremely competitive exchange rates.

We convert funds into your required local currency at the wholesale rates offered by our banking partners or payment service providers.  The wholesale rate is the rate offered by banks for high-volume transactions. It’s based on the market rate which you see on XE.com and other financial sites.  We use the wholesale rate at the time when we send the payment to your team.

What currencies does Papaya support for payout?

We support over 100 payout currencies: more than 80 of them directly through our global banking partners, JPMorgan and Citibank, and the remainder in partnership with a range of best-in-class global payment service providers.  For the small (and diminishing) number of payout currencies that we can’t support, we have relationships with in-country partners, who can work directly with our customers to deliver payments in those countries.

Why shouldn’t I just make these payments straight from my bank account?

Our automated platform and our global payment network guarantee that your teams will always be paid the right amount on the right day.  You won’t need to set up and execute payments manually from your bank account, where you risk making a mistake and you can’t be sure the money will arrive on time.  Your bank won’t usually give you any visibility of whether your payment has arrived safely.  Just as importantly, this can also be an expensive option, with banks making foreign exchange markups of up to 5% and sometimes even higher.