In 2020, the G20 launched the roadmap for improving cross-border payments, developed by the Financial Stability Board in coordination with the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and other standard-setting bodies. The goal has now become something of a mantra: to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent and inclusive. Making it a reality has proven challenging.
We understood from day one that this was going to be difficult. To calibrate the ambition and to create a degree of accountability, in 2021, we asked the G20 to endorse a set of global quantitative measures, most of which are set for end-2027. And those measures tell us we still have a way to go.
With the end of the roadmap approaching in 2027, we have the opportunity to reflect on what we have achieved so far and what further steps would be helpful. And it’s not just for us in the FSB to ask those questions. It’s for every other stakeholder as well.
Challenges along the road
The history of the roadmap is full of lessons for us. The simple fact that we have had to update and reset the roadmap a number of times is itself striking. This is not plain sailing.
The first challenge has to do with market structure and incentives: people will have different views, and payment specialists think their work is the most important. But cross-border payments are somewhat marginal to the business model of most of the companies that provide this service. Furthermore, the sense in which there is a traditional competitive market driving quality and innovation is limited, because those markets are complex. Each major corridor sometimes seems to behave like its own market, with distinct frictions. Regions behave differently from each other. We talk about global cross-border payments, but it’s more complex than that phrase suggests.
Second, we face exogenous dependencies: for example, it has become clear that cross-border payments rely heavily on foreign exchange markets, which are the largest markets in the world and outside the remit of our roadmap.
Third, technology adoption dynamics are important in cross-border payments. We are constantly told that there is immense technological potential for efficiencies and new services, but it remains a fact that the market is dominated by participants who often appear to be seeking second- or even third-mover advantage.
Finally, the necessary political and regulatory authority is widely distributed: there is no global authority with a mandate to make this work well. Even at the domestic level, there is often limited effective coordination. Importantly, the issue cuts across the sensitive division of responsibilities between central banks and finance ministries. At the same time, there are many global standard-setters and organisations with an interest. We have tried to work with all of them.
Adding all that up amounts to a real challenge for policy-makers. On the one hand, we may not be able to rely as much as we hoped on competitive markets to resolve issues, even if we do everything we can to make space for competition to work well. On the other hand, we haven’t got well-established global authorities to direct change. Neither the visible nor the invisible hand seems to have a strong grip on this issue.
Where next?
But it is far from hopeless. I suspect the FSB back in 2020 did something important in trying to find a way through these challenges. When we set up the roadmap, we bought into an important simplifying idea: use the FSB’s convening power to smooth out as many as possible of the regulatory and policy impediments in market dynamics to improve cost, speed, transparency and access. We have done that. The thought was ‘let’s test what competition can achieve’.
As we move towards 2027, however, we now have to ask the difficult question of what the results are telling us about that approach. Has our focus on removing frictions been sufficient? Should we double down on it? Should we pivot to operational planning such as we are currently testing with the jurisdictional and regional action plans we are working on? Or should we step back and just let the technology innovators lead?
Technology solutions
Turning to technology innovators first, a much-talked about option is whether stablecoins could be the silver bullet. There are varying measures for the volume of cross-border payments, but let’s just say total payments in 2024 were at or around $200tn. In contrast, the volume of cross-border payments being made by stablecoins is estimated to be only a fraction of this – by some estimates less than 0.2% of total cross-border payments in 2025.
The order of magnitude tells a clear story: today, stablecoin volumes remain a very small share of total cross-border flows. There has been some exploration of large financial institutional use cases. Their most immediate value may be as components in hybrid models – integrated with bank money and interoperable foreign exchange/settlement – rather than as standalone global rails. But neither is more than a possibility at this point.
Reducing frictions
The work has not just been about creating better policy frameworks; it has also been about technical frictions. Poor data quality and limited standardisation of data exchange make cross-border payments more complex to process, in turn affecting their speed, price and transparency. Promoting the adoption of common message formats, including conversion and mapping from legacy formats and the use of legal entity identifiers and common protocols for data exchange, does mitigate the frictions.
When ISO 20022 was first introduced in 2004, it marked the beginning of an important journey towards a new era of simpler, more data-rich payments for banks and their customers. One of the original building blocks of our roadmap in 2020 (building block 14) was adopting ISO-harmonised message formats. Twenty-plus years after the original version of the ISO standard, we are at 77% of fast payments systems and 53% of real-time gross settlement systems reporting implementation of the messaging standard.
This is good. But it has taken a very long time and it’s not complete. Without the extensive work of CPMI, I suspect we would not have achieved this much. We also know that implementation is necessary but not sufficient. The value of the ISO standard comes from consistent usage, ensuring rich data and embedding the standard into end-to-end operations; for example, screening, reconciliation, fraud analytics and supervision, not just message conversion.
Extensive efforts here have undoubtedly made a difference. But to fully realise the potential benefits of the ISO standard, continuous development is needed to align the messages to evolving market practices and embed them into operations. For example, while ISO 20022 includes enhanced data elements that can strengthen anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism measures, a recent study found that many financial institutions continue to rely on traditional screening methods developed for payment messages.
ISO 20022 carries more data than legacy messaging formats, so banks could use it to create a fully integrated payments experience, giving them an end-to-end view of operations from initiation and delivery of the payment to exceptions, investigations and reporting. But this requires a pretty large investment.
Other challenges persist
Our work has also highlighted other challenges where we have sought to promote better practices, but we continue to hear about issues. These include: data sharing to fight fraud; smooth processes where capital controls exist; efficient ways to do sanctions screening; how foreign exchange access restrictions work; payment versus payment coverage; and opening hours.
How do we get from identifying frictions to global implementation of solutions to those frictions? One of our key reflections is about leadership and regional organisation. This is an area that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have done a lot of work on. Jurisdictions need to carefully assign responsibility, regions need effective regional co-operation structures.
What comes after the roadmap?
My view is this: we are coming to the end of the roadmap, but not yet the end of the journey. The roadmap’s goals surely endure. Perhaps the lesson of recent years is that coordination is proving to be the scarce resource.
So, as we look beyond 2027, the question is not simply what we do next, but how we choose to organise ourselves to do it. Is continued friction-removal enough to unlock better outcomes, or do we need corridor-by-corridor or region-by-region operational plans with clear ownership?
If neither path is sufficient on its own, what blend would be credible and politically sustainable across jurisdictions? How far should we push standardisation or integration without eroding domestic policy options or privacy protections? As technology evolves, should stablecoins and tokenised deposits complement integrated models, or catalysts for new rails? Who will be the champions of a second roadmap?
And finally, what should success look like after 2027 – not just in metrics, but in lived experience for people and companies in every region? Maybe speed, cost and transparency are not all equally important to end-users.
We need the help of every stakeholder in the system to reflect on where we are and what we should achieve, to convene discussions, to send us submissions, to engage with us and each other to make sure a further roadmap really leads to substantive change.
Martin Moloney is Deputy Secretary General of the Financial Stability Board.
This article is adapted from a speech given at an OMFIF event: Global financial stability: digital assets and next-generation cross-border payments. Read the full speech here.
Mariam Khan is an Economist at OMFIF.
Interested in this topic? Subscribe to OMFIF’s newsletter for more.