The Financial Stability Board looked at progress on the G20 cross-border payments roadmap in 2025 and found only slight global improvement since the first performance indicators were calculated in 2023. It said policy work so far had not yet produced real gains for end users, and that satisfactory improvement by the 2027 deadline was unlikely.
The targets are steep. For retail cross-border payments, the G20 wants a global average cost of no more than 1 percent by the end of 2027, with no corridor above 3 percent. For remittances, the long-standing goal is a global average below 3 percent for sending the equivalent of $200.
Apps got better; the plumbing did not
Mobile apps, APIs and digital wallets have changed how people start a payment. What happens after they press send is another matter. A 2026 paper from the Bank for International Settlements argues that cross-border payments remain costlier, slower and less transparent than domestic ones, because private innovation alone cannot overcome limited interoperability and institutional differences between countries.
Correspondent banking still carries much of the journey. A sending bank may have no account with the recipient’s bank, so the instruction passes through one or more intermediaries, each of which validates the message, updates accounts and handles exceptions. The BIS describes a network of nostro and vostro accounts in which messaging, reconciliation and settlement are separate. Different operating hours, holidays and systems cause delays.
Compliance and currency
Every payment also triggers customer due diligence, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing checks, and sanctions screening. Software speeds this up, but it does not remove the obligations. Data rules differ across borders, which the FSB says leads to duplicated checks, manual intervention and less straight-through processing.
A payment that changes currency is also a foreign-exchange trade. Someone must quote the rate, hold the currencies and absorb the risk of rates moving. Deep currency pairs get cheaper through competition. Thinner corridors do not. A low transfer fee can also mislead, since the exchange-rate margin may be larger than the visible fee, especially on small transfers. The World Bank counts both in its Remittance Prices Worldwide database, which tracks hundreds of country corridors because prices differ so much by route.
Faster domestic systems have not solved it. Most instant payment systems were built around national rules and currencies. Project Nexus, a BIS Innovation Hub effort, aims to give them a standard way to connect rather than requiring a separate integration for each pair. Swift finished moving cross-border payment instructions to the ISO 20022 message standard in November 2025, but the CPMI updated its harmonised requirements in February 2026 because using the same standard in different ways breaks data quality.
What could lower costs
Reform efforts now aim at duplication in the system: linking payment systems, aligning data and message standards, making regulation more consistent and widening competition in FX and payment access. Project Rialto, another BIS Innovation Hub project, is testing whether automated FX conversion and settlement in central bank money can simplify the chain.
The reports do not expect payments to become free. Compliance, liquidity, currency conversion and cyber resilience all carry real costs. The aim is to stop paying for manual repair, repeated controls and unnecessary intermediaries.
