Anna Tobin on Building the Financial Infrastructure for Global Startups

A startup might begin with two founders and one bank account. Then it hires a developer in South America, opens a coworking arrangement in Spain, engages lawyers in another jurisdiction, starts accepting payments from European customers, and pays contractors using stablecoins.

Growth is happening exactly as planned.

Behind the scenes, however, the company’s finances can become increasingly fragmented.

Anna Tobin, Business Development Lead at Performa, believes this is an overlooked consequence of building a modern global company. With roughly 15 years of experience spanning fintech, startups, payments, banking ventures, digital assets, and Web3, Tobin has watched financial operations become considerably more complicated as businesses cross borders.

The opportunity she sees isn’t simply to create another payment method. It’s to give businesses a clearer way to manage an increasingly fragmented financial infrastructure.

Global Ambition Creates Financial Complexity

Remote work has dramatically expanded the talent pool available to startups. A company headquartered in one country can hire employees and contractors almost anywhere.

Its customers can be equally distributed.

That creates enormous opportunities, but money still has to move between those people, businesses, currencies, and financial systems.

As companies grow organically, their financial stack tends to grow the same way.

One service might handle an international transfer. Another might handle invoicing. Traditional bank accounts hold fiat currency, while separate digital wallets manage stablecoins and other digital assets. Accounting and reconciliation may happen somewhere else entirely.

Each individual tool can solve a legitimate problem. Collectively, however, they can create a new one: fragmentation.

Tobin says that pattern repeatedly emerged through Performa’s customer-development conversations with founders, finance teams, and operations professionals around the world.

The challenge wasn’t simply making a payment.

It was understanding the complete financial picture afterward.

A growing company can potentially have multiple traditional bank accounts alongside several digital-asset wallets.

Someone eventually has to reconcile all of them.

When that process relies heavily on spreadsheets and manually assembled information, the business introduces additional administrative work and opportunities for human error.

For a small company, that burden can land directly on a founder.

Tobin has seen founders spend significant portions of their day resolving transfers and dealing with banking processes when their attention could have been directed toward customers, products, hiring, or growth.

This is where Performa is positioning its infrastructure.

Rather than requiring businesses to abandon existing financial relationships, Performa is developing a unified environment where users can connect existing business bank accounts through open-banking capabilities while also viewing their digital-asset wallets.

By bringing transaction information together, finance and operations teams can gain a more consolidated view for reporting, reconciliation, and decision-making.

Stablecoins Change the Cross-Border Equation

Digital assets add complexity to the financial stack, but Tobin argues that they can also solve important problems—particularly when it comes to moving money internationally.

Traditional cross-border transfers can encounter intermediary institutions, fees, settlement delays, currency conversion, and banking-hour restrictions.

Stablecoins provide another option.

For businesses already comfortable operating with digital assets, they can enable faster settlement and provide an on-chain record that makes transactions easier to track.

That becomes particularly relevant for digitally native companies with globally distributed workforces.

A company might have a contractor who prefers stablecoins while another employee needs to receive local fiat currency. A vendor may require a conventional bank transfer. Customers, meanwhile, could be paying through entirely different rails.

The future Tobin describes isn’t necessarily one in which fiat disappears and every business becomes exclusively crypto-based.

Instead, it’s one where companies need infrastructure capable of accommodating both.

Financial Infrastructure Should Scale With the Company

Founders spend enormous amounts of time thinking about whether their technology can scale.

Tobin believes they should ask the same question about finance.

If a company plans to expand internationally, its financial operations should not become substantially harder every time it enters another market or hires someone in another country.

That means thinking about payments before the existing process becomes painful.

Warning signs can be straightforward: founders personally spending hours handling payouts, an increasing number of platforms and accounts, difficulties paying employees or contractors on time, growing foreign-exchange costs, or reconciliation becoming dependent on increasingly complicated spreadsheets.

These aren’t merely administrative inconveniences.

Payment reliability can affect relationships with employees, contractors, and vendors. Talented people expect to be paid correctly and on time. Financial friction can therefore become operational friction.

For Tobin, the larger principle is simple: a company with global ambitions needs a financial stack designed for global operations.

Building Around Customers Instead of Features

Performa’s development process also reflects a broader lesson for startups.

Tobin says the team conducted extensive customer-development interviews before and during product development, speaking directly with the people responsible for moving money inside companies.

Instead of beginning with a list of features, they asked questions about workflows.

How many accounts does the company use? Where does money come in? Where does it go? Which processes consume the most time? Where do errors happen? If technical limitations and budgets disappeared, what would the ideal experience look like?

Those conversations informed the product.

It’s an approach Tobin believes remains essential as Performa expands. A lean team can listen to a customer, identify a legitimate recurring problem, communicate it to product teams, and potentially turn that insight into an improvement relatively quickly.

That agility becomes especially important in financial technology, where regulation, digital assets, payment infrastructure, and customer expectations continue evolving.

Performa itself is expanding internationally.

Tobin says the company has established operations in Canada and Spain and is pursuing further financial infrastructure and regulatory capabilities. Its roadmap also includes integrations with accounting platforms such as QuickBooks and broader open-banking capabilities.

Latin America is another area Tobin finds particularly compelling because of the region’s evolving payments ecosystem and adoption of new financial technologies.

The expansion mirrors the problem Performa is attempting to solve for its own customers: how does a company operate effectively when business no longer fits neatly inside one country’s financial system?

For founders, Tobin suggests examining their own infrastructure before growth exposes its limitations.

The question isn’t merely whether today’s payment process works.

It’s whether the same process will still work when the company has more employees, more contractors, more currencies, more markets, more customers, more accounts, and more transactions.

Because a startup’s financial infrastructure shouldn’t become the thing that prevents a global business from becoming global.

Want more Grit Daily Startup Show? Take a look at past articles, head over to YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.