FitMap: Identifying Businesses That Need Cross-Border Payment Infrastructure
The Why
Finding businesses that may need cross-border payment infrastructure is much more difficult than identifying companies that operate internationally. A company may have operations across several countries, collect payments in multiple currencies, make international payments, or require regular access to US dollars. These characteristics indicate international activity, but they do not necessarily indicate an unmet infrastructure need.
For a financial infrastructure provider, the more useful question is not simply which companies operate across borders. It is which companies have recurring money movement problems, what evidence exists to support that assessment, and which products can address those problems.
This becomes particularly challenging when the potential universe contains hundreds or thousands of companies across multiple markets. Researching each company manually, evaluating the evidence consistently, determining whether the company is actually a suitable prospect, and then matching the company to the appropriate product can quickly become a repetitive and time-consuming process. FitMap was designed to structure that process.
What It Is
FitMap is a research and scoring tool for identifying businesses with potential cross-border money movement needs and mapping those needs to the financial infrastructure that is most relevant to them. The tool uses publicly available information to evaluate companies against four core indicators: recurring cross-border payments, persistent USD liquidity requirements, multi-market local collections and payouts, and recurring multi-currency obligations.
These indicators provide the foundation for determining whether a company has characteristics that could create a need for cross-border financial infrastructure. The assessment goes further by considering the quality of the evidence supporting each signal. A specific figure disclosed in a financial filing, for example, provides a stronger basis for an assessment than a general statement about international operations. The result is a structured view of potential opportunities rather than a simple database of companies operating internationally.
FitMap currently evaluates 55 companies across 35 markets and maps company needs to specific infrastructure offerings including Payments API and Widget, Currency Conversion, Global USD Accounts, Local Collections and Payouts, Stablecoin Settlement, Treasury Management, and Wallets and Custody.
Who It's For
FitMap is designed for teams that need to identify and research potential customers for cross-border financial infrastructure. This includes business development teams looking for prospects, product teams assessing product-market fit, market expansion teams evaluating new opportunities, and strategy teams researching where demand for financial infrastructure exists.
The tool is particularly useful where the potential customer base is large and the research required to qualify each company is significant. Instead of treating every company as an equally likely opportunity, FitMap provides a structured way to narrow the universe based on observable business characteristics and publicly available evidence.
The Thinking Behind It
The central challenge in building FitMap was determining what constitutes meaningful evidence of a cross-border infrastructure need.
The four signals are weighted according to their importance, while the strength of the evidence supporting each signal affects its contribution to the overall score.
This distinction is important because the number of signals alone does not determine the quality of an opportunity. A company with several weak indicators should not automatically rank above a company with fewer but much stronger signals.
The framework also considers the relevance and timing of the evidence. A company expanding into new markets or experiencing increasing exposure to multiple currencies may represent a different opportunity from a company with the same historical characteristics but no indication of current activity.
Another important part of the framework is exclusion logic. Not every company with a high structural fit should become a prospect. A company operating within a single country and currency may not have a meaningful cross-border need. A subsidiary whose financial decisions are controlled by a parent company may not be an appropriate target. A company already providing similar infrastructure to the same customer base may be a competitor rather than a potential customer.
These conditions are therefore incorporated into the assessment rather than left for a user to discover after the ranking has been generated.
This creates an important distinction between problem fit and prospect fit. A company can have a strong underlying need while still being unsuitable for a particular commercial approach.
What It Produces
FitMap produces several layers of analysis that can be used independently or together.
The Companies view ranks businesses based on the strength of their cross-border infrastructure needs. Each company receives a score and classification, while excluded companies remain visible together with the reason for their exclusion.
The tool also identifies the specific products that match each company's needs. This moves the analysis beyond identifying potential customers and into determining what the customer may actually need.
A company with recurring USD liquidity requirements, for example, may show a stronger fit for Global USD Accounts or Treasury Management. A company collecting and distributing funds across several markets may have a stronger fit for Local Collections and Payouts. Another company with a need to move money programmatically across markets may have a stronger fit for Payments API and Widget.
The By Offering view reverses this process. Instead of starting with a company and asking which products may be relevant, it starts with an offering and identifies the companies with the strongest potential fit for that particular product.
This makes the tool useful from both sides of the commercial process: identifying companies that may need the infrastructure and identifying companies that are most relevant to a particular product.
Market Analysis
Company-level opportunity is only one part of the picture. The market in which a company operates can determine whether an infrastructure opportunity is practical to pursue.
FitMap therefore includes a separate market analysis covering factors such as regulatory friction, available payment rails, local partners, existing market presence, and constraints around moving or accessing funds.
This allows the opportunity to be considered from both sides. A company may have a clear need for cross-border infrastructure, but the market may have regulatory or infrastructure constraints that affect how that need can be addressed.
Evidence and Scoring
A key feature of FitMap is the ability to inspect the evidence behind the score.
Rather than treating the final ranking as the output of an opaque model, the tool exposes the underlying signals and their contributions. Users can see the signals contributing to a company's score, the weight assigned to each signal, the strength of the supporting evidence, signal decay, and the contribution of individual factors to the final assessment.
The framework also includes known positive examples and negative controls as part of its validation. In the current dataset, 4 out of 4 known customers rank highly, while 9 out of 9 negative controls are held back.
These validation checks provide a way to test whether the framework is distinguishing between companies that should appear as strong opportunities and companies that should not.
How FitMap Works
The workflow begins with the company universe and the evidence available for each business. Relevant public information is assessed against the defined cross-border signals, and the strength of those signals contributes to the company's score. The company is then evaluated against exclusion criteria and product-fit rules. The resulting assessment determines its classification, overall score, relevant products, and supporting evidence.
From there, users can explore the companies with the strongest potential fit, investigate individual companies, examine the evidence behind their scores, or approach the analysis from a specific product offering. The same framework can then be viewed at the market level to understand where infrastructure demand exists and what constraints may affect the opportunity.
FitMap and Layover
FitMap was developed alongside another tool, Layover, to look at two different parts of the same cross-border payment problem.
FitMap focuses on finding the opportunity. It identifies companies that may have a cross-border infrastructure need and maps those needs to the relevant product.
Layover focuses on understanding the economics of moving the money. It allows payment routes to be compared based on transaction fees, FX margins, on and off-ramp costs, settlement time, cash tied up in transit, prefunding, and cost of capital.
The two tools can therefore work together. FitMap can identify a company with a potential need for a particular payment or settlement infrastructure, while Layover can be used to examine the economics of different rails for the underlying payment requirement.
Technology Stack
FitMap was built as an interactive Streamlit application, with the scoring framework, company and market assessments, evidence logic, product matching, and visualisation integrated into the application.
The interface allows users to adjust scoring parameters, explore companies and markets, inspect individual evidence, and move between different views of the opportunity. It was built with Python and Streamlit, with data processing and analysis handled within the application.
What This Project Represents
FitMap demonstrates how publicly available information can be transformed into a structured commercial research process.
The challenge is not simply finding information about companies. The more difficult part is determining which information is relevant, assessing the strength of the evidence, distinguishing between genuine opportunities and false positives, and connecting an identified need to a specific financial product.
That process becomes increasingly valuable as the number of potential companies and markets grows. Instead of researching every company from scratch, FitMap provides a consistent framework for evaluating a much larger opportunity set and identifying where deeper research may be worthwhile.
At its core, FitMap connects the company, the problem, the evidence, the market, and the product.
FitMap is live on Streamlit: https://fitmap.streamlit.app/ Layover is live on Streamlit: https://layover.streamlit.app/
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