It’s 2025. The creator economy is global, the pace of marketing is real-time, and campaigns span continents. Somehow, paying creators still feels stuck in 2002 when PayPal started supporting International payouts.

For global brands, agencies, and platforms, working with influencers, freelancers, and creative vendors has become central to marketing strategy. Content workflows have scaled, but financial operations haven’t. Behind every seamless TikTok campaign or cross-border affiliate push lies a tangle of slow onboarding, tax complexity, inconsistent payment rails, and support backlogs.

In this post, we’ll explore why global creator payments remain a massive operational headache, and how leaders are finally solving it.

The Creator Economy Is Global. Payments? Not So Much.

In a world where a UK-based creator promotes a U.S. product with a Japanese distributor and invoices through a Canadian management firm, friction is inevitable. Brands can’t afford to ignore it anymore.

According to a 2024 Business Insider report, over 68% of enterprise marketers cited “cross-border payment issues” as one of their top operational challenges in managing influencer partnerships. Despite advances in fintech and cross-border payments, legacy AP systems and generic payout platforms still dominate most workflows. It has gotten easier to move money, it’s the rest of the backend operations that slow down the ability to partner globally.

It’s not just a paperwork problem; it’s a performance blocker.

As Lexie Barnhorn, Head of Influencer Marketing at Notion, puts it:

“We went from dozens of POs, vendors, and invoices for each campaign to one vendor, one PO, one invoice. Lumanu has been a game changer for my team, our finance team, and our creators.”

The 5 Core Pain Points Behind Global Creator Payments

1. Onboarding Creators Is Not Built for Scale

Every creator or freelancer you work with becomes a vendor. That means collecting legal names, bank info, tax IDs, and verifying them sometimes across jurisdictions.

• U.S. creators? You need a W-9.

• International influencers? W-8BEN, plus OFAC/AML screening, plus FX routing setup.

This gets unwieldy quickly, especially for marketing teams who need to move quickly. And your finance team? They’re stuck helping creators troubleshoot onboarding forms just to issue a single $1,000 payment.

“Our finance team has a million things they do. Eliminating onboarding and general ledger entries for each creator was a huge time saver.”
— Wyatt Lowe, Sr. Director of Performance Marketing at MaryRuth’s

2. Tax Compliance Is a Global Maze

If you think creator campaigns are fast-moving, try keeping up with tax regulations. Large Enterprises must handle:

• 1099 filing for U.S. freelancers

• VAT or GST registration in EU, UK, AU, and beyond

• Withholding tax across multiple jurisdictions

• Accurate year-end reporting

Miss a filing or under-report a threshold, and your legal and finance teams could be on the hook. It’s why more organizations are shifting compliance and tax liability to platforms that act as the Master Vendor of record, like Lumanu.

“We were sending out 500+ 1099s per year to event staff… Lumanu eliminated countless hours of collecting bank details and W9s.”
— Frank Catrambrone, CEO at GO Events

3. Global Banking Rails Are Still Challenging

• ACH works in the U.S.

• SEPA in Europe

• PIX in Brazil

• UPI in India

If you’re using legacy AP tools or PayPal, you’re probably defaulting to costly wire transfers and incurring fees, causing delays, and annoying creators. Worse, many platforms offer no visibility of payment status to the recipient, which leads to a flurry of “Where’s my payment?” emails and back and forth between creators, Marketing teams, and Finance.

Creators just want payouts that are fast, local, and reliable. Is that too much to ask for?

4. Financial Controls Fall Apart Across Currencies

Marketing teams operate in dozens of countries, across multiple business units and brands. But finance still needs:

• Budget controls by region and campaign

• Currency conversion tracking

• Approval workflows

• Centralized reporting and reconciliation

Trying to bolt this on using spreadsheets and generic AP systems is a recipe for audit risk and time drain.

“In a large corporate setting, our compliance protocols hindered agility. Lumanu gave us a solution which checked all the boxes for compliance, customization, and flexibility.”
— Nick Wagner, VP of Finance & Ops at Warner Music

5. Vendor Experience Impacts Brand Reputation

Today’s top creators and production vendors expect fast, transparent, consumer-grade payment experiences. If you’re late to pay or they don’t know when to expect funds, you’ll be spending time figuring it out. Often, this means spending more time and effort across teams. In the worst cases, your vendors take their complaints public, posting about a poor experience with your business.

Paying creators late doesn’t just slow down campaigns, it damages trust and relationships.

“Lumanu transformed our approach to influencer partnerships by acting as our single vendor to manage all onboarding and compliance. Our business teams love the platform.”
— Danielle Ford, VP, Business & Legal Affairs at Warner Music

The Broken Workarounds Everyone’s Still Using

Many teams have tried to duct-tape solutions together:

• PayPal for one-off creators (but with no audit trail or tax reporting)

• Manual onboarding via spreadsheets

• AP tools like Bill.com or Coupa, retrofitted for marketing payments

• Influencer platforms that “include payouts,” but offload tax and reconciliation

These fail as soon as volume, complexity, or compliance requirements increase, which leaves Finance and Marketing Ops to clean up the mess.

What Enterprises Need For Streamlined Global Payments in 2025

To fix global creator payments, the most forward-thinking companies are moving to platforms that:

• Act as a Master Vendor: onboarded once in your ERP, managing all downstream payees

• Support global payouts: and pay creators in their local currency via local rails

• Automate compliance: including W-8/W-9 collection, tax filing, and AML screening

• Offer true financial controls: segregated wallets, approval workflows, and audit logs

• Delight creators: fast payments, self-serve dashboards, mobile-first onboarding

Lumanu: Purpose-Built for the Creator Economy

Lumanu is the first global payment platform designed specifically for marketing and creator supply chains.

We handle:

✅ Vendor onboarding & verification across borders
✅ Local currency payouts in 100+ countries
✅ Compliance & tax reporting as the payer of record
✅ Financial controls for your brand, team, and finance workflows
✅ Creator-first experience with Instant Pay and real-time updates

Trusted by teams at Notion, Warner Music, WeightWatchers, PepsiCo, and more.

The Bottom Line: Stop Letting Payments Block Performance

You’ve invested in great creators. You’ve got campaigns going live globally. Why let payments, which are the final mission-critical step, be the bottleneck?

It’s time to stop retrofitting outdated systems and embrace a future-ready approach.

Visit our Global Payments webpage to learn more about Lumanu’s global payments offering, and visit our Country Explorer page to learn about the currencies that we support.

👉 Book a personalized demo to see how Lumanu eliminates global creator payment headaches once and for all.