In 2026, the global SaaS market is projected to reach $465 billion by Precedence Research, and large enterprises accounted for a staggering 62% of SaaS revenue in 2025.
Yet, there is conversation in the market that enterprise SaaS growth is beginning to slow. Finding new ways to grow can be especially hard for large companies that already have many subscribers, or which are chasing growth through new subscription services in addition to their usual offerings.
The big question remains: How do you overcome the complex financial and technical hurdles of doing business globally?
Spoiler alert: Global enterprise growth has an “easy button” with a merchant of record. Let’s take a look at how this powerful payment platform model solves enterprise-grade headaches.
FastSpring is how Enterprise game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.
Enterprise Global Expansion = High Stakes, Higher Friction
Enterprise leaders currently face three primary challenges that prevent them from capturing international market share:
- High Investment and High Risk in Emerging Markets: You know the opportunity is massive, but the investment required to build local entities, hire tax experts, and establish banking relationships is astronomically high. While North America remains the largest market, Asia-Pacific is now the fastest-growing region globally, with a 24.6% CAGR in virtual fitness as an example. Effectively capturing new users in this space requires native options for buyers or local entities, but the risk of getting it wrong in a regulated market often stalls expansion plans before they begin.
- The Architecture Gap: You need an enterprise-grade payment architecture that is resilient, localized, and compliant. However, correctly building all of that takes significant time, money, and specialized experience. Most organizations try to solve this with a domestic-only infrastructure, resulting in the “entity gap”: a state in which your regional web traffic is ready to buy, but sales can’t proceed because you don’t support local payment methods or don’t have local entities, leading to high cross-border decline rates.
- The Need for Flexibility: You want the ability to adjust your rollout based on real-time data without incurring unexpected costs or risk. Traditionally, capturing 100% of market potential in regions such as India, Brazil, or Indonesia has required permanent local subsidiaries, which take years to establish. But you need the flexibility to test markets without being locked into analog-era banking setups that make it difficult to pivot.
These challenges can make it exceedingly complex or slow to expand into new global markets, even for well-established enterprise SaaS companies.
So What Is a Merchant of Record (MoR)?
Simply put, a merchant of record is a service provider that acts as your software’s reseller. While you maintain the brand experience and customer relationship, the MoR assumes the majority of the liability for the transaction.
The MoR model allows a company to “go live tomorrow.” Because the MoR already holds local entities and tax registrations across 200+ regions, you can leverage its infrastructure as your own. This is the strategic solution to the entity gap. For global enterprises, the barrier to international revenue is rarely a lack of demand — it’s the infrastructure.
Why Do Traditional Payment Providers Fail at Scale?
Most enterprises start with a standard payment service provider (PSP) such as Stripe, PayPal, or Square. However, as you expand into multiple regions (some with complex tax rules and regulations), the limitations of a PSP create a revenue ceiling:
- Missed Opportunities: It’s common for global leaders to see significant web traffic from regions like India or Mexico, only to find they can’t process a single transaction because they lack a local legal entity. One FastSpring customer was losing 20% of web traffic in India before implementing an MoR that accepted local payment methods, which are otherwise inaccessible without a local entity.
- Unnecessary Discounts: When internal infrastructure can’t support global growth, teams look for scrappy, alternative growth tactics that provide a quick revenue boost but which don’t maintain profit margins over the long term. A merchant of record provides a sustainable alternative to this by making it easy to unlock untapped revenue in new territories rather than slashing prices in existing markets.
- Administrative Burden: When your expansion plans reach your tax and legal departments, they’re often vetoed due to the complexity of managing local taxes and varying economic nexus laws (nexus is the defined threshold for tax liability on sales).
- Tax Law Fragmentation: Beyond tax calculation, enterprises struggle with data fragmentation. A fragmented payment setup creates a reconciliation nightmare, where transaction data lives in silos. A robust MoR provides a single source of truth, ensuring that every transaction — regardless of currency or country — carries a consistent data schema that meets global KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) standards.
How to Scale With Speed and Flexibility
Every large company fears the need to “rip and replace” an existing infrastructure, even if that means sticking with a solution that’s not meeting their needs. Modern MoR solutions such as FastSpring address this through something called “headless deployment.” Let’s look at an example.
Avid, a leader in creative software, needed a global online payments solution that would leverage its recent investment in a new composable commerce stack. By implementing FastSpring as its MoR, they didn’t have to abandon their existing proprietary subscription engines or dunning logic. Instead:
- Avid managed the customer experience, subscriptions, and dunning.
- They layered FastSpring on top to manage the back-end: global payments, tax collection, and compliance.
- They went live in just three weeks and saw 4% of transactions come in through newly added payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which supports long-term retention through buyer-friendly payment methods.
This headless approach is critical for organizations using middleware platforms for orchestration and entitlements. Instead of a brittle, hard-coded integration, an enterprise-grade MoR uses webhooks and robust APIs to push real-time transaction data into your data lake or BI tools (like Snowflake or Tableau). This enables real-time revenue recognition, a necessity for both public companies and those preparing for an exit.
That’s how you scale without friction.
Even Your Back-Office Team Will Rejoice
Internal tax and finance teams are often the strongest skeptics regarding global expansion. An MoR turns these skeptics into advocates by providing:
- Liability Offloading: The MoR is responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting all global taxes. If you get audited in Indonesia, the MoR handles it — not your internal team.
- One Report to Rule Them All: Instead of reconciling thousands of transactions across dozens of currencies and banks, your finance team receives a single, consolidated payment and a clean data set.
- ERP Integration: Leading MoR solutions such as FastSpring provide data that flows seamlessly into SAP Commerce, S/4HANA, and other enterprise backends, ensuring the cycles of planning, execution, and analysis are always data-driven and efficient.
This isn’t just about a CSV export — it’s about automated GL mapping. Leading MoR solutions allow you to map transaction types directly to your internal chart of accounts (COA). This turns a week-long, manual month-end close into an automated process, reducing human error and ensuring that your ERP sub-ledgers are always in sync with your actual cash flow.
Lessons From the Field: Navigating LATAM and APAC
Enterprise expansion often fails in these regions due to the infrastructure barrier. According to a Baymard study, businesses that enable regionally preferred payment methods see 21% higher growth rates than those that don’t.
Treating a Brazilian or Indian transaction as “cross-border” by routing it through a U.S. or EU bank is a recipe for involuntary churn. For a local bank, a foreign-processed transaction poses a security risk, leading to higher decline rates.
With an MoR as your local legal entity, the transaction stays “in-country.” This shift doesn’t just lower fees; it fundamentally stabilizes your leaky funnel by ensuring valid customers aren’t blocked by banking security flags.
Similarly, forcing a mobile-first economy into a credit-card-only checkout creates another barrier. While credit cards dominate the West, they are the exception in high-growth regions.
In India for example, credit card penetration is under 5%, while UPI (Unified Payments Interface) accounts for over 75% of digital retail transactions. Similarly, in Brazil, Pix has surpassed 150 million users. It’s not necessarily about having more payment methods; it’s about having the right ones.
Bridging the Entity Gap for Global Growth
The transition from a domestic success story to a global enterprise powerhouse is no longer a matter of simply “turning on” new regions. For the modern SaaS leader, the merchant of record model is more than a compliance shortcut — it’s a strategic lever for revenue operations. It represents the end of the entity gap, allowing your organization to:
- Reclaim Lost Revenue: Stop losing 20% or more of your international traffic to avoidable cross-border declines.
- Decouple Growth from Headcount: Scale into 200+ countries without hiring a team of tax experts or managing dozens of local entities.
- Empower the Back Office: Transform your finance and tax departments by offloading the liability and complexity of global nexus and tax laws.
Global expansion in 2026 isn’t about being present in every market — it’s about being native to every market. By partnering with an MoR like FastSpring, you ensure that your infrastructure is as agile as your code.
The demand is there. The customers are ready. It’s time to close the gap.
You built the software. Let FastSpring build your global payments strategy.
FastSpring is how Enterprise companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software.
Ready to try FastSpring? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.
