During the past week Citi and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) have published separate reports on cross border payments. Both papers explore G20 targets for improving cross border payments. Unfortunately, 2024 speed figures were worse than 2023 for wholesale, retail and remittance payments, largely reflecting more accurate data. Citi’s report highlights that fintechs expect to gain 10% in market share from banks in the next two to five years. Its survey shows that DLT is one tool to address the pain points, but more in the medium term.
The G20’s targets for 2027 are multifaceted, including improving speed, cost, transparency and access. After improvements last year, the speed statistics have gone backwards in 2024. For wholesale payments, this has more to do with some calculation changes by Swift. The others seem to boil down to more accurate data in 2024.
For example, 99.6% of North American B2P payments settled in one day in 2023, but the figure collapsed to 46.3% in 2024. Similarly, in South Asia, the one day figure went from close to 100% in 2023 to just over 20% in 2024. The explanation for the American figure was that far more payment providers shared speed data compared to 2023. However, the data reported comes from less than a quarter of payment providers. That could mean as more providers share data, the statistics might get worse.
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