No payment left behind

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individuals currently bear the brunt of problems around cross-border transactions so global cooperation, including on regulation, will be vital if efforts to remove fragmentation, speed up transaction times and widen e-commerce opportunities are to succeed.

Speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Summit 2025 (IFGS) in London, Livia Benisty, chief external affairs officer at Banking Circle, said the friction inherent in global payments and transactions is “slightly more existential” for SMEs and individuals. However, the problem is more than just high interchange or foreign exchange fees.

Speaking during a panel discussion, ‘Seamless finance: Breaking barriers for global interoperabilityʼ, alongside Robinhood UK, Curve, Thunes and Swift, Benisty said for many SMEs, the opportunities presented by e-commerce in a globalised world are out of reach.

This is down not just to cost but also speed, she added. “If a payment takes five days every day, that’s money that’s not in the bank account of an individual that needs it, or an SME that needs liquidity for its supply chain.”

Andrew Stewart, Thunesʼ chief revenue officer, Europe, agreed that the slowness of SME payments are the “real challenge at the moment”.

“I think there have been huge strides in what I would call peer-to-peer consumer payments,” he said. “When it comes to SME payments, there’s an expectation now, with the emergence of real-time domestic or regional schemes, that if I can pay domestically in real time, why canʼt I pay cross-border? It’s an inhibitor to trade and to working capital.”

G20 priority

Cross-border payments interoperability is so central to global economic stability that the G20 made it a goal in 2020. The aim is to achieve faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible payments by 2027, with a specific target of 75 per cent of cross-border wholesale payments being credited within one hour. 

This is being pursued through the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments, which outlines three key themes: payment system interoperability and extension; legal, regulatory, and supervisory frameworks; and data exchange and message standards. 

There are several initiatives progressing globally that align with the G20 goals, including the current migration to the ISO 20022 standard for Swift messages. Fiat-backed stablecoins and programmable money are also being examined.

Last year, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) launched Project Agorá, a collaboration between central banks and the private sector to explore how the tokenisation of wholesale central bank money and commercial bank deposits on programmable platforms can improve the monetary system and enhance global transactions. Meanwhile, projects aimed at interlinking the various emerging domestic payments schemes are also being evaluated.

While the issue is complicated for all sizes of businesses, the current fragmented regulatory and infrastructure environment exacerbates the challenges of providing real-time clearing, reducing fees and harmonised standards to improve efficiency and accessibility.

Adam Bealey, Swift head of UK and Ireland, highlighted the global impact of fragmentation outlined in a recent report published by Swift and Economist Impact, Growth at a crossroads: Measuring the cost of financial fragmentation.

Friction in international trade hinders economic growth on a global scale, said Bealey. The Swift/Economist report projected global gross domestic product (GDP) losses ranging from 1.2 per cent by 2030 in the best-case scenario to almost six per cent, or the equivalent of $6.5 trillion, if cross-border capital flows decline.

UK success

However, in terms of addressing these concerns, Bealey pointed to the UKʼs progress in meeting the G20 objectives around speed, cost, transparency, and access.

“The UK is kind of within touching distance of hitting the 75 per cent credited to the end beneficiary within an hour,” he said. “We also do see that from a traceability perspective, 95 per cent of the payments coming into the UK are fully tracked and confirmed end-to-end.”

This progress needs to be replicated across the global stage, he added. “Global organisations are really doubling down on interoperability to ensure that no country, no consumer, no business, effectively gets left behind.”

However, Shachar Bialick, founder and CEO of Curve, expressed frustration that “the big guys” supporting infrastructure such as Swift have had “decades” to find solutions to cross-border frictions but have made little progress.

He pointed to the rise of programmable money and stablecoin technology, which are poised to “displace” traditional infrastructure for global transactions. This technology can be built fast, with very low costs, and currencies underpin it, he added.

Given how long it has taken to solve some of these global problems, Bialick said, “it doesn’t matter how many good engineers we have, we are probably better off just moving to the new technology coming in”.

Bealey countered by saying that while progress with programmable money and stablecoins is essential, the industry needs to consider “inclusivity” when examining cross-border movements worldwide. Swift supports payments across 200 countries and territories, he added.

“We are very conscious that there’s going to be a multi-network, multi-platform model,” Bealey said. “We are looking at stablecoins, we’re looking around the technology, we’ve got lots of activities going on across the world that are really looking to tackle and solve the problems and the challenges for today, but we’re also working to ensure that we don’t leave people behind on that journey.”

Interoperability will be core to integrating stablecoins into the global cross-border network, due to the challenges surrounding their connection to fiat currencies and central banks with “on- and off-ramps”, he added.

Jordan Sinclair, head of Robinhood UK, also agreed that new technology should solve access issues. “There’s a world where thereʼs eventually 24/7 access via tokenisation, and that’s a perfect example of a technology that gives the end customer the same access that institutions, SMEs, everyone can benefit from,” he said. “There’s still some ways to go, but technology will be the impetus to get there.”