The Digital Iron Curtain: How Payment Barriers Perpetuate Inequality

December 5, 2025

The Digital Iron Curtain: How Payment Barriers Perpetuate Inequality

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A success and a promising future are often framed as the sole result of talent and determination. While those qualities are essential, we must first confront an uncomfortable truth: a lot of your financial destiny depends on the environment you were born into and the digital infrastructure you have access to. The ensuing challenge faced by local entrepreneurs starkly illustrates how payment barriers perpetuate inequality, creating two distinct global economic classes.

For a digital entrepreneur or content creator in New York, London, or Berlin, the global economy is an open highway, and the essential tools of commerce are instantaneous. For their equally ambitious and talented counterpart in a country like Montenegro, it’s a series of locked gates and broken roads. The country may use the Euro and be geographically European, but when it comes to the digital economy, its people are trapped behind a devastatingly effective digital iron curtain.

This is an inconvenience. It is also a profound economic and psychological handicap that stunts national growth and forces the best talent to flee. In this article, you will find the following:

Services That Simply Don’t Exist

A modern creator’s toolkit is standardised, built upon the seamless flow of global capital. The absence of these fundamental services in Montenegro creates a payment blockage at the source.

Stripe is not available in Montenegro.

PayPal (for receiving money) is not available in Montenegro.

GoFundMe is not available in Montenegro.

Kickstarter is not available in Montenegro.

Etsy is not available in Montenegro.

And so the list goes…

The gravity of the problem is the cascading systemic failure that this represents. These platforms are the foundation of nearly every modern digital business model. Because the primary payment processors (like Stripe and PayPal) are legally and operationally absent, a massive ecosystem of online sales is immediately rendered unusable. This means that getting paid through popular platforms, such as Patreon, Substack, Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Stan Store, Buy Me a Coffee, and many others, is impossible. These services require a primary payment processor that is legally and operationally present in the entrepreneur’s home country.

Furthermore, the ability to raise seed capital, fund creative projects, or receive charitable support through major global peer-to-peer funding sites is severed, cutting off crucial early-stage and community funding that fuels innovation globally. There are also export barriers since an artisan or small business cannot sell products internationally via major global digital marketplaces, forcing them into complex, high-fee alternative solutions that lack buyer trust.

The High-Friction Alternatives

The creator or an entrepreneur can possess world-class talent and build a desirable product, but the fundamental, friction-free mechanism for receiving money from the global market is fatally compromised. However, there are still some options like Payoneer, Wise, or specialised payment gateways like 2Checkout. These platforms offer a lifeline, but they are not seamless substitutes for the missing infrastructure.

Services like these require shifting customers to a separate, dedicated membership platform or forcing a redirection from the native shopping cart to a bank transfer or virtual account. This introduces substantial operational friction for the customer and layers higher transaction fees onto the creator, potentially resulting in maintenance fees or less competitive exchange rate markups compared to bulk processors.

Furthermore, solutions like 2Checkout, while available, are often geared towards larger e-commerce operations, demanding greater setup, thus higher digital literacy, and often involving higher merchant fees than global competitors like Stripe to compensate for the complexity of the region.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain payment systems offer theoretical alternatives that bypass traditional banking, but volatility, limited merchant adoption, and regulatory uncertainty mean they haven’t solved the fundamental problem of reliable, mainstream payment processing.

The Mental Tax on Innovation

The psychological burden on the entrepreneur is immense, representing a hidden cost that goes far beyond banking fees. While their peers abroad are focused entirely on creation, growth, and audience engagement, the Montenegrin entrepreneur is constantly fighting bureaucracy and logistics.

This fight is exhausting. Every hour spent researching banking laws, liaising with confusing foreign and domestic regulators, filling complex forms, or navigating expensive cross-border transfers is an hour not spent building, marketing, or innovating. This effectively lowers the local talent’s economic productivity relative to global competitors.

Worse, when a country constantly blocks basic opportunities, people begin to internalise limits. This sustained battle with the system chips away at the belief that one can build something truly meaningful, leading to self-imposed constraints. It forces people to think smaller, because scaling globally is not seamless – it is a complicated, multi-jurisdictional financial puzzle. Consequently, they hesitate before launching new ideas or taking calculated risks, knowing every new feature or platform integration requires yet another costly, time-consuming administrative workaround. Meanwhile, there’s a constant comparison to creators abroad who, despite similar talent, are growing exponentially faster, leading you to question why the path is so profoundly different. This fuels the constant, exhausting feeling of being “behind,” even when you are working just as hard, if not harder.

This pressure is the true mental tax, transforming structural barriers into psychological ones where the entrepreneur must overcome the global marketplace, their local bureaucracy, and their own sense of diminished possibility, making survival an act of sheer, defiant will.

The Macro-Impact of This Blockade

The consequence of these digital roadblocks is not merely lost revenue for a few ambitious entrepreneurs; it represents a structural economic handicap that threatens the viability of an entire nation. Montenegro, with a population smaller than most major European cities, operates an economy that is small, fragile, and dangerously undiversified. Its GDP growth remains sluggish and perilously dependent on volatile sectors like tourism, while public spending continues to consume capital at an unsustainable pace.

For a country this size, there is effectively no viable “local market” for digital creators or tech businesses. You cannot build inward; you must build outward and export high-value services and goods globally to achieve scale and inject foreign capital into the system. This external income is essential for diversifying the economy, stabilising finances, and providing sustainable income sources for its citizens.

The digital payment infrastructure gap actively sabotages this critical economic pathway. When talented Montenegrins cannot easily monetise their work globally, several cascading failures occur simultaneously. Foreign currency that should flow into the country through digital services never arrives, depriving the national economy of vital capital injection. The few who do succeed must route payments through complex, fee-laden workarounds that significantly reduce their effective income, meaning less money circulates domestically and less tax revenue reaches public coffers. High-potential creators and entrepreneurs, watching their international peers thrive while they struggle with basic transactions, increasingly choose emigration over perseverance, creating a devastating brain drain that strips the country of its most valuable asset: human capital capable of building the future economy.

This creates a cycle of underdevelopment. Without a strong digital infrastructure, promising talent leaves. Without talent, there’s less pressure to build infrastructure. Without infrastructure, foreign tech investment finds more hospitable environments elsewhere. The country remains trapped in its traditional economic model, unable to pivot toward the high-margin, scalable digital economy that has transformed the prosperity of other small nations.

The opportunity cost is staggering. Every software developer who emigrates to Berlin, every designer who moves to London, every writer who relocates to New York represents not just a lost taxpayer, but a lost multiplier effect. These are individuals who could have started their own organisations and employed others, mentored the next generation, and built products that put Montenegro on the global digital map. Instead, they export their productivity to countries that were already winning, widening the prosperity gap with each departure.

Why This Matters Beyond Montenegro

I am intimately familiar with the struggles in Montenegro because I was born in this small country and have lived these barriers firsthand. However, this problem is emblematic of a far larger crisis affecting hundreds of millions of people across the developing world. Millions of people are locked out of the global economy not because they lack talent, ambition, or ideas, but because of outdated financial regulations, limited banking infrastructure, low commercial priorities, geopolitical assumptions, fear of compliance complexity, and even basic Internet connection.

This gap in digital infrastructure, both public and private, is not merely an inconvenience. It is a mechanism keeping developing countries locked in poverty. When entrepreneurs cannot easily participate in the global digital economy, they are confined to domestic markets that are often too small, too poor, or too unstable to sustain innovative businesses. The high-margin, scalable opportunities that have created unprecedented wealth in developed nations remain functionally inaccessible, regardless of talent or effort.

The cruelty is that these barriers exist not because global digital and financial systems are technically incapable of expansion, but because of corporate risk calculations and the simple fact that serving smaller and weaker markets is less immediately profitable. Millions of people with world-class abilities are prevented from contributing their talents at full capacity. The innovations not created, the businesses not launched, the jobs not generated… This represents an enormous collective loss, not just for those countries, but for humanity as a whole. In an interconnected world, we all pay the price for squandered potential.

Moving Forward

The solution likely requires coordinated effort from multiple directions, though the path forward is complex and uncertain. Montenegro’s decade-long struggle with PayPal illustrates this perfectly. The service became partially available in 2014, allowing users to send payments but not receive them. More than ten years later, users still cannot access full functionality. The Regional Cooperation Council has taken over negotiations on behalf of the Western Balkans, but PayPal has not responded to their inquiries for months. Each side points fingers. PayPal previously claimed Montenegrin regulations were the obstacle, while Montenegrin institutions insist they’ve met all prerequisites and the decision rests entirely with PayPal. This opacity and mutual deflection typifies the problem: there’s no clear accountability, no transparent timeline, and no compelling pressure forcing resolution.

Institutional action can, however, move the needle. In October 2025, Montenegro became the first Western Balkan country to achieve full SEPA membership through coordinated efforts between the government, the Central Bank, commercial banks, and support from the European Commission and World Bank, enabling faster and cheaper euro transfers within Europe.

While this addresses regional banking infrastructure, it doesn’t solve the access to global payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, and the ecosystem they enable remains blocked. What’s needed now is applying that same coordinated pressure to global payment platforms: industry representatives organising collectively to present compelling business cases, payment platforms taking incremental expansion steps, or regional processors forming strategic partnerships.

The truth is, no single solution will unlock these gates overnight, but without sustained pressure, transparent benchmarks, and creative problem-solving from all stakeholders, the status quo will persist indefinitely, and another decade will pass with talented people locked out.

My Deep Respect

Finally, there are those who persist amid these structural failures. Against extraordinary odds, facing exhausting friction and constant disappointment, they continue to build, to create, to launch. These digital professionals, the software developers building SaaS products through payment workarounds, the designers serving international clients despite banking obstacles, the writers and educators monetizing their expertise through convoluted financial gymnastics, possess not just talent, but something rarer: the business acumen to navigate impossible complexity, the intellect to engineer workarounds others cannot imagine, and the grit to wake up each day and fight battles their international peers never face.

All of these individuals are heroic, not because they succeed despite the barriers, but because they refuse to accept that their geographic coordinates should determine their economic destiny. Every business they launch is an act of defiance against a system designed to obstruct and exclude them. They are proving that talent is not geographically concentrated, that innovation transcends borders, and that the human drive to create cannot be extinguished by bureaucracy.

They are building the foundation for a future digital economy, and demonstrating to policymakers and platforms alike that these markets are viable and this fight is worth waging. To those who persist in Montenegro and every other country trapped behind this digital barrier: your struggle is seen, your determination matters, and the future you are building will be all the more remarkable because of what you overcame to create it.

If you know someone who might benefit from reading this article, please feel free to pass it along. Knowing it lands somewhere meaningful makes the effort of writing all the more worthwhile.