KEY RESULTS AT A GLANCE

• Local Entity setup eliminated from 4–6 months and $50K+ per country to zero
• Onboarding time reduced 99% - from weeks of coordination to under 24 hours
• Payroll admin cut by 75% - from juggling multiple providers to a single platform
• Compliance risk reduced to near-zero - Rise manages UK and Mexico employment law end-to-end

About Routefusion

Routefusion is a cross-border payments and banking infrastructure company based in Austin, TX. They built a unified API that lets platforms, fintechs, and financial institutions send payments to 185+ countries, open multi-currency accounts, and manage FX, all from a single integration.

Think of them as the plumbing behind global money movement.

Their customers embed Routefusion’s infrastructure into their own products so their end users can move money internationally without dealing with the mess of stitching together dozens of banking partners, compliance workflows, and payment rails on their own.

Routefusion works with everyone from neobanks and payroll companies to marketplaces and MSBs. The common thread is they all need to move money across borders reliably, compliantly, and at scale, and they don’t want to spend 18 months building that infrastructure themselves.

The Challenge: International Hiring Was a 6-Month Bottleneck

Before Rise, employing people outside the US was a significant operational headache for Routefusion.

With team members in the UK and Mexico, the options were limited: set up local entities in each country, which is a process that typically takes 4–6 months and costs upwards of $50,000 per jurisdiction, or try to manage it through a patchwork of local accountants, legal counsel, and payroll providers that didn’t talk to each other.

The compliance side was the biggest pain point.

Every country has its own employment laws, tax obligations, and benefits requirements, and getting any of it wrong carries real risk. For a company Routefusion’s size, dedicating internal resources to becoming experts in UK and Mexican labor law just wasn’t realistic. They needed to stay focused on their core business, building payments infrastructure, not figuring out the nuances of PAYE in the UK or IMSS contributions in Mexico.

Payroll itself was also clunky. Coordinating payment schedules across multiple countries, currencies, and providers meant 10–15 hours per month of manual work and a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks.

As Routefusion put it:

“It’s ironic, we literally build payments infrastructure for a living, but paying our own international team was still harder than it should have been.”

The Solution: Rise Removed the Entire Problem

Rise essentially removed the entire problem. We act as the employer of record for Routefusion’s UK and Mexico-based team members, which means we handle all the local compliance, employment contracts, tax filings, and benefits so Routefusion doesn’t have to set up entities or manage any of that themselves.

The onboarding process was fast and Routefusion was up and running in under 24 hours, not the 2–4 weeks they’d previously experienced.

Their team members get paid on time, in their local currency, with proper benefits and full compliance with local labor laws. And from Routefusion’s side, it’s all managed through a single platform instead of juggling multiple providers across countries.

What Routefusion really appreciates is that Rise lets them punch above their weight internationally.

Rise lets us punch above our weight internationally. We can hire the best people regardless of where they are without it becoming an operational burden. We get to focus on what we're good at, building world-class payments infrastructure and Rise handles the rest. - Routefusion Team

They can hire the best people regardless of where they are without it becoming an operational burden. For a company that’s scaling quickly and expanding into new markets, that flexibility is huge.

They get to focus on what they’re good at, building world-class payments infrastructure, and Rise handles the rest.

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