At ₹5M to ₹50M ACV, your payment processor becomes a line item that either shrinks or balloons depending on geography, currency, and settlement speed. Stripe is a default for global companies. Razorpay dominates India. Wise moves money fast but charges for currency conversion. Local processors—2C2P in Thailand, GXP in Vietnam, Midtrans in Indonesia—own settlement speed but orphan you into regional silos. We tested integration costs, fee structures, and reconciliation complexity across all four categories. The right choice depends on where your customers live, how many currencies you touch, and whether you can tolerate fragmented reporting. Stripe: Global parity, highest friction below ₹50M Stripe charges 2.9% + ₹30 per transaction on Indian domestic cards. For cross-border, add another 1% for currency conversion. At ₹5M ACV with a 70% credit card take rate, you're paying ₹145K–₹160K monthly in processing fees alone. Settlement lands in 2 business days to your connected bank account. The integration is clean—Stripe's API is the baseline all others are measured against. Dashboard reporting is comprehensive. But at your scale, you're subsidizing Stripe's global arbitrage. A ₹10M ACV business processing ₹700K monthly in cards pays Stripe ₹20K in fees. That's 2.86% of gross payment volume. Not ruinous, but not cheap. Stripe's moat is simplicity and trust. You don't manage bank relationships. PCI compliance is Stripe's problem. The cost of not integrating Stripe is higher than the cost of paying Stripe—until you scale past ₹50M ACV, at which point you can negotiate volume discounts or layer in a second processor for domestic traffic. Stripe also owns e-signature compliance across regions if you use Stripe Identity for KYC, though this is rarely the constraint in Southeast Asia. Razorpay: Cheaper in India, useless outside it Razorpay charges 2.0% + ₹0–₹30 per transaction on domestic Indian payments. That's 0.9 percentage points cheaper than Stripe. At ₹700K monthly in cards, you save ₹6,300 per month versus Stripe. Over a year, that's ₹75,600. But Razorpay's reach stops at India's borders. If 40% of your volume is cross-border or from Southeast Asian customers paying in local currency, you'll need a second processor anyway. The savings evaporate when you factor in integration and reconciliation overhead. Settlement is 1 business day for Razorpay—slightly faster than Stripe. Their dashboard is built for Indian tax compliance (GSTIN, e-invoicing), which is genuinely useful if you're running an India-first business. But reconciliation across Razorpay (domestic) and Stripe (cross-border) means two webhooks, two reconciliation jobs, and a higher bug surface. Use Razorpay if 80%+ of your payment volume is Indian domestic. Otherwise, the complexity tax outweighs the 0.9% fee saving. Wise (formerly TransferWise): Margin wins on currency but not transaction fees Wise is not a payment processor—it's a multi-currency settlement layer. You still need Stripe or Razorpay to process cards. But if you're collecting in USD and settling in INR, SGD, THB, or PHP, Wise's mid-market exchange rate saves you 1.5%–2% on currency conversion versus Stripe's fixed markup. Here's the math: Stripe charges a 1% currency conversion fee on top of their processing fee. Wise charges 0.4%–0.7% depending on the corridor. If you're processing ₹700K monthly and 30% of that volume originates from Singapore or Malaysia (SGD/MYR), you're converting ₹210K monthly at a currency spread. Stripe: 1% spread = ₹2,100 loss per month Wise: 0.5% spread = ₹1,050 loss per month Annual savings: ₹12,600 on currency alone But Wise doesn't reduce transaction processing fees. You still pay 2.9% + ₹30 to Stripe or 2.0% to Razorpay. Wise only fixes currency margin. And Wise requires a manual reconciliation step—you process cards in Stripe, then sweep to Wise for settlement. That's faster than manual bank transfers, but it's still a separate operation. Wise wins if you're multi-currency heavy (40%+ cross-border volume) and can tolerate an extra settlement step. For single-currency businesses, the benefit vanishes. Local processors: Settlement speed you need, fragmentation you don't 2C2P (Thailand), GXP (Vietnam), Midtrans (Indonesia), and similar regional players settle in same-day or next-morning to local bank accounts. This matters if cash flow is tight or you're staffing regional teams that pay daily. Midtrans (owned by Verifone) charges 2.9% for domestic Indonesian cards with same-day settlement. That's cheaper than Stripe on fees but marginally—the real win is speed. If you're operating an e-commerce business in Indonesia and need cash in your Mandiri account by noon, Midtrans delivers. The cost is reconciliation. Each local processor has its own API, webhook format, and dashboard. By ₹20M ACV, if you're running on Midtrans (Indonesia), GXP (Vietnam), and Stripe (cross-border), you have three separate reconciliation jobs. That's 12–16 engineering hours per month in int