The G20 has set targets for faster, cheaper and more reliable cross-border payments, but official progress reports show that most retail payments still fall well short of the speed goals.
As pricing between providers converges, the question of whether a payment actually arrives, and how quickly, is becoming the one that decides who wins the business.
Moshe Kimhi is the CEO and founder of Neema, a global cross-border payments platform powering fintechs, digital wallets and financial institutions worldwide. In this contributed piece, he argues that international payments behave less like a wallet and more like a journey by car, and that providers need dynamic, real-time routing to keep transactions from failing. The views expressed are his own.
A year or two ago, the cross-border payments conversation was largely about price. Providers competed on rate sheets and commercial terms, and clients picked whomever offered the best deal. That competition did its job, as the rate gap between providers has narrowed. But with the price factor becoming less central, a more fundamental consideration has emerged, one that price competition was never going to solve: will the money actually get there? And will it get there fast enough to matter?
The switch in focus is an outgrowth of a trend I’ve been noticing in the fintech world, one that goes beyond my own experiences with the money transfer companies using our routing technology to move funds between countries: efforts to improve cross-border payments have not yet translated into meaningfully better outcomes for the people actually sending and receiving money.
Cross-border payments falling short on success rates
A 2025 progress report released by the G20’s Financial Stability Board found that while there have been some improvements in access to reliable cross-border payments, “progress is not advancing as quickly as needed.” The Bank for International Settlements was even more specific about what’s going wrong, finding that just 35 per cent of global cross-border retail payments and 55 per cent of wholesale and remittance payments are credited within one hour of initiation, well short of the G20 target of 75 per cent.
These findings confirm what many in the industry already sense: with cross-border payments experiencing much greater friction than domestic transactions, reliable on-time delivery is now the sharpest differentiator among cross-border payment providers.
Trillions of dollars at stake
With cross-border spending continuing to grow, from $194.6 trillion in 2024 to a projected $320 trillion by 2032, there’s a lot at stake when transactions go awry. One of the main methods for sending money abroad is through digital wallets, which now account for about 62 per cent of global remittance transactions, far outpacing bank transfers.
Remittances are a major factor spurring the growth of cross-border transactions, with about three-quarters of the world’s 280 million migrant workers sending money home once every month or two, across over 190 countries. Most of those users prefer mobile and online remittance platforms due to convenience and speed. In addition, more than 85 countries have adopted real-time payment systems, increasingly turning faster payments into an expectation internationally as well as domestically.
Static routing is no longer enough
“Wallets” are the metaphor we typically use to talk about a prevalent method of moving money digitally, but that phrase is actually a bit misleading. After all, digital payments are not static objects that we take out of our pockets. It would be more accurate to think of digital payments, especially international ones, as a dynamic moving process, like driving a car.
The usual drive to work might go perfectly smoothly on Monday but hit a snag on Tuesday, with a traffic accident or blocked lane leaving you sitting in traffic and arriving late to your meeting. And over the weekend you might be headed to a different location, the cinema, the beach, the in-laws, and have a whole new set of alternative routes to evaluate. Just as many of us use navigational tools like Waze, Google Maps or Apple Maps that take into account the origin, the destination, the routes in between and the real-time traffic conditions, we also need a Waze for real-time financial transactions to make sure our money takes the right route each time rather than relying on the same path for each journey. What constitutes the best route today is dynamic and constantly changing, so payment technology needs to quickly identify the most reliable route from the source to the destination at a particular hour on a particular day, while also balancing other factors including cost, speed and payment method.
When money transfer companies fail to recognise that, they and their customers run the risk of payments sitting stalled in traffic and sometimes failing to arrive at their destination.
The risks of high failure rates
The greater the spike in digital cross-border payments, the greater the impact of failed or delayed transactions. Failed transactions pose a significant risk to both consumers and the money transfer companies they use. For consumers, the attendant risk is more significant than pricing variability, because while fees and exchange rates can affect the cost of the transaction, payment success rates determine whether the payment even makes it to its destination in a timely manner.
For money transfer companies, repeated transaction failures pose a different kind of threat: as customers see that their funds aren’t reaching the destination smoothly, quickly and reliably, their trust in the brand erodes and transaction volume decreases. Churn rises and customer acquisition becomes more challenging. In addition, dealing with the challenges of repeated transactions increases operational overhead.
The ability to evaluate multiple routes in real time is key to maintaining high transaction success rates and retaining satisfied customers in an increasingly competitive industry, regardless of what’s happening on the road that day.
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