By: Tim Staheli
A Court of Appeal case about a cash-transport dispute raises an odd question: why, in 2026, is anyone still flying banknotes between continents?
£35 million left the UK for Asia-Pacific in physical cash, and $1.9 million of it didn’t come back. The resulting dispute, MA Fastmove Ltd v Global Billpay Private Ltd & Ors, reached the Court of Appeal on 19 June and was decided by three judges, including the Master of the Rolls. The underlying 2022 agreement between the parties wasn’t for a payment rail, an API, or a correspondent banking arrangement. It was for the transport, conversion, and remittance of large sums of cash.
The industry has mostly finished moving to ISO 20022: 97% of Swift payment instructions were already using the new standard by the time the old messaging format was retired in November 2025. Instant payment schemes are now standard in dozens of markets. Stablecoins are pitched as the thing that finally kills off the slow correspondent banking chain. And yet arrangements like the one in this case are still out there. A meaningful slice of cross-border payments still works this way, far from the conference-circuit version of the industry.
Take remittances, the clearest place to see where money actually crosses borders for ordinary reasons. Global flows to low- and middle-income countries reached $685 billion in 2024, according to World Bank estimates, more than foreign direct investment and development aid combined. A good chunk of that never touches a bank account at either end. World Bank pricing data show that cash pickup is, on average, cheaper than paying into a bank account, and it remains far more important in rural areas across Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, where the nearest agent might be the only financial infrastructure for miles. Digital take-up is rising everywhere it’s been measured. It hasn’t caught up with cash in the places where cash was already cheapest and easiest.
Then there’s the system that the World Bank’s numbers don’t count at all. Hawala and its regional relatives move value between people who trust each other and a network of brokers, with no wire, no ledger entry, and no correspondent bank in the middle. Estimates of its size vary wildly because, by design, it leaves no paper trail to measure. Even the IMF’s own paper on the subject admits as much.
None of this makes the digitalisation story wrong. ISO 20022 genuinely improves the data travelling with a payment, and stablecoins offer something faster than a three-day correspondent chain in the corridors where they’ve taken hold. But how the industry talks about payments and how payments happen are two different things. Up on the conference stage, money sounds like data. A message. Something that clears in seconds. Closer to the ground, in the corridors where regulated firms and the informal economy sit side by side, money is still sometimes a heavy, physical object that someone has to carry, weigh, declare, and hand over.
This isn’t only a frontier-market story, either. Canada still processes tens of millions of cheques a year, in a country with some of the most advanced instant-payment ambitions in the G7. The persistence of “antiquated” payment methods isn’t primarily about poverty or a lack of infrastructure. Payment habits outlast payment technology, and whole populations – a Canadian business paying a supplier, a family relying on a cash-pickup corridor – keep using what works for them long after the industry has moved the conversation on.
Whether any of this changes quickly depends on what’s pushing against it. Government policy is already doing some of the work. Saudi Arabia has run 0% fee promotions on its Pakistan remittance corridor specifically to pull senders away from hawala into formal channels, and it’s worked, at least in that corridor. The United States is taking the opposite route: a new 1% tax on cash-funded remittances started in January 2026. Rather than making digital transfers cheaper, it makes cash transfers more expensive. Both countries are trying to shift the same behaviour, sending money in cash, just by pulling on price from opposite directions.
Generational change is doing some of the work too, separately from any policy. Younger migrant workers send money through apps more readily than their parents did, largely because they grew up with a smartphone in hand. But that’s a slow-moving force, and it doesn’t touch the reasons cash persists in the first place: an agent counter is sometimes the only financial infrastructure within reach, and a face-to-face handover is sometimes worth more to the recipient than a bank transfer that arrives faster but requires an account, a smartphone, and trust in an app they’ve never used.
None of that means cash is going away any time soon. It means the places where cash is the only option will keep shrinking, slowly, one policy and one generation at a time. No single new technology is going to make the physical movement of money obsolete overnight.
Spencer West’s Ramie Farag, acting for the successful appellant, said he was delighted to have secured a favourable outcome for a client that had traded in foreign exchange for almost 35 years without incident. The cash side of cross-border finance isn’t a relic waiting to be swept away by the next new rail. It’s an older, working system that predates most of the technology now built to replace it.
The payments industry talks a lot about the last mile. This case is a reminder that for a good slice of global money movement, the last mile is still measured in checked baggage.
