Podcast | The G20 Roadmap and the Future of Cross Border Payments

Amid four packed days at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, experts from across the transaction banking space came together to discuss (among many other topics from a long agenda) how to make cross-border payments better. Today, trillions of dollars move across borders each day and global commerce has become more digital than ever, which means that implementation is becoming a central priority.

In the final hours of the conference, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) made time to sit down with Deepa Sinha, Senior Vice President for Payments and Financial Crimes at BAFT, and Shriyanka Hore, Global Head of Industry Engagement at Swift, to discuss how far the industry has come and how far it still has to go.

The G20 roadmap for cross-border payments, endorsed in 2020, set a collective goal of making international payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more accessible by 2027. Even in 2025, fragmented regulations and differing market practices mean that a cross-border payment can look very different depending on where it starts and ends.

Momentum, milestones, and measurable impact

There can be little doubt that the industry has advanced since 2020. Under the G20 framework, countries agreed to track progress against measurable targets, including the goals that 75% of cross-border payments should reach the beneficiary within one hour, and average transaction costs should fall below 1%.

Hore said, “75% of payments sent over Swift reach the end beneficiary country in ten minutes, which is a stark difference from the sixty-minute target.” Clearly, the cross-border rails are not the problem; the regulations and market practices in the domestic last mile have structural frictions.

But there is more to consider than speed alone. The same time period has seen considerable alignment among key stakeholders like regulators, central banks, and industry bodies. Sinha said, “Regulators and standard-setting bodies like the FSB and CPMI have set global standards on ISO 20022 adoption and payment system interlinking, as well as supervisory frameworks.”

The move to ISO 20022 (a common language for financial messaging) is perhaps the most visible milestone. In November 2025, Swift will end its period of co-existence between MT and ISO 20022 messaging (though with a contingency offered to institutions that have not completed their migrations), and the richer, more structured data of ISO 20022 will become the standard for international transactions, aligning with over 80 domestic real-time gross settlement systems worldwide.

Yet, for all this progress, the “last mile” of cross border payments still presents a challenge.

The last-mile problem

If the G20 roadmap has a bottleneck, it is at the point of the payment chain where funds move from an international system into a local account. Despite vast improvements in cross-border reach, settlement within domestic networks is still highly uneven.

Hore said, “Twenty per cent of the time is spent on the cross-border mile, and the last mile really takes eighty per cent… because there are structural frictions like FX and capital controls, screening, and limited RTGS availability.”

Those structural frictions can vary greatly by jurisdiction. Some stem from time zone differences and limited operating hours, and others from regulatory reporting or compliance requirements.

Sinha said these frictions show a deeper issue. “Even if the technology is ready, differing domestic rules, capital controls, and supervisory expectations mean cross-border payments cannot achieve consistent speed or cost efficiency.”

She added, “High compliance costs in AML/CFT push banks to exit higher-risk markets… and that can cut off remittance flows and hurt small and medium-sized enterprises.”

Faster payments may exist in principle, but they are not yet evenly distributed across regions or institutions.

Standards and interoperability in global payments

After years of focusing on speed, the industry’s next challenge is interoperability, which means ensuring that systems, standards, and regulations actually work together.

Sinha said, “Initially, the conversation was about technology fixes – faster rails, new platforms, and ISO standards – but now it’s shifting towards ecosystem-wide coordination.” That shift is evident in BAFT’s expanding role as a bridge between banks, fintechs, and regulators, using its councils and white papers to align priorities across the public and private sectors.

Hore added, “It takes collective and community effort”

For Swift, the next phase involves continuation of all efforts towards interoperability and the G20 roadmap.

On standards, continuing to support the development of market practices that extend interoperability across payment types. Instant Payment Plus (IP+), for example, is a market practice for retail payments that will allow for true interoperability between bilateral and multilateral linkages and how it can connect, including with Swift’s infrastructure and scheme.

Alongside this, the new distributed ledger rails aim to enable 24/7 settlement and token transfers alongside traditional rails, while wallet partnerships are expanding access to billions of new endpoints.

“Interoperability is really about reusing what’s out there in the industry… Only when policy and practice meet is progress possible,” Hore said. To that end, Swift recently launched a Policy Lab at Sibos to convene policymakers and practitioners in one forum, recognising that regulatory dialogue is as vital as technical design.

Looking towards 2027 and beyond

Less than two years remain before the G20’s 2027 deadline. Hore said she hopes that by the time Sibos reconvenes in Miami next year, the conversation will have moved on. ISO20022 will be part of the machinery, and we’ll have made progress with the new scheme and shared ledger, bringing the industry closer to the vision of ninety per cent of payments credited within an hour, full value delivery, and the end user benefiting from real-time access to funds and choice.

Sinha shared that vision, adding, “If instant payment systems are extended internationally with harmonised standards and shared governance, it can solve the last-mile problem, reduce costs, and expand access for everyone.”

Achieving those outcomes will require sustained public-private collaboration, consistent regulation, and continued technical innovation. But if the past five years have shown anything, it’s that industry coordination (once considered the hardest part) has begun to take root.

The G20 roadmap’s success will be reflected in the ability of every market, large or small, to send and receive value across borders, a goal that feels more and more like an inevitabilit