Where the G20 cross-border payments roadmap really stands

Six years into the G20’s roadmap for faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive cross-border payments, it seems fair to ask: are cross-border payments finally changing? 

The industry has built an enormous amount of infrastructure. ISO 20022, harmonized data, pre-validation services, instant payment rails, to name but a few.

But are customers seeing any of the benefits? Not yet, according to a panel of industry experts at EBAday 2026. Pratiksha Pathak, Head of Payments at RedCompass Labs, characterized the progress to date as “infrastructure heavy, customer light”.

The industry has made progress, and we have better standards, better domestic rails, better tracking, and more regulatory alignment. But the G20 ambition was not to create better compliance programs: it was to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive. On that test, progress is still partial, uneven, and too slow. 

Moderated by Takeshi Shirakami of the Bank for International Settlements, the session brought together Swift, two banks and two solution providers: Johan Egnell (Swift, Head of Nordics), Simon Eacott (NatWest, Head of Payments), Kasper Almar Mortensen (Nordea, Head of Payments and Cash Management Product Management), Pratiksha Pathak (RedCompass Labs, Head of Payments), and Dr. Hubertus von Poser (PPI, Member of Management Board).  

It ran across the key areas — speed, cost, transparency, and technology — and a recurring theme cut through all of them.

Change is happening, but the market is driving it 

“It’s clear that it’s not the regulation itself…that’s driving this change,” argued Egnell. “It’s market practitioners making decisions based on sort of a business outcome.” 

Across Swift’s Nordic footprint (the conference was in Copenhagen, after all), he said, there isn’t a single bank without the G20 roadmap on its agenda, which he doubted was true when the report landed in 2021. On Swift’s own metrics — speed, transparency, cost, and access — things are improving. “I think some people would argue that [cross-border payments are] always changing, but perhaps the speed of change has increased.” 

He pointed to incoming-payment speeds in Europe rising several percent over the past year on the back of bank action rather than regulation. 

That “market over mandate” view was echoed by Mortensen, who said Nordea feels driven by competition rather than waiting for rules: “We…feel very, very guided by the commercial market, so we don’t need this to become a regulation, because the market will take care of that.” 

It became one of the panel’s two firm consensus points: the G20 goals are still the right outcomes, but competition and customer expectations are what will actually deliver them. 

“We’ve built the motorways. We now need to make sure that we can drive on them and get them to…the end user fast.”

The last mile

The second consensus point was where the difficulty now lives. With the big rails laid and the end in sight for the MT-to-MX migration, every panellist pointed to the “last mile” as a key area of focus. What happens inside the beneficiary bank, in sanctions screening, and in each local jurisdiction? 

“We’ve built the motorways,” said Eacott. “We now need to make sure that we can drive on them and get them to…the end user fast.” The enabler, he argued, is data. Clean, structured, transparent data is what allows straight-through processing, smarter fraud control, and new propositions. He also noted that the November 2025 MT-to-MX milestone was reached with translation as a backstop; the harder test comes with structured addresses, when there is no fallback, and payments will be rejected if they do not meet the standard: “when the real rubber hits the road.” 

Egnell reinforced why this can’t be solved alone. Cross-border payments are inherently multilateral. Multiple currencies, multiple intermediaries, sending and receiving banks. So cleaning up your own data achieves little if what arrives is unusable. “It’s a community thing,” he said. Everyone has to do their part.  

Von Poser added that harmonization is still needed within ISO 20022 and between standards, including better alignment of release cycles, which are a real operational burden for banks juggling separate updates for cross-border and high-value flows. 

Cost versus price

The area all the experts agreed has seen the least progress was cost. Eacott drew a line between price and cost: price is set by market competition, and that is healthy and to be encouraged, but the underlying cost is the multifaceted thing the industry actually has to attack – clearing-system opening hours, liquidity management, jurisdictional regulation, and more. 

“The biggest cost failure is where the customer doesn’t see at all, which is the cost of failure of the transitions and the repair, which goes on the back of it,” Pathak added. “If we keep introducing 10 different regulatory projects, we’re going to spend millions and billions without even realizing the actual benefit of those regulations.” 

Repairs that happen when a payment drops out – invisible to the customer – pile expense onto the system, often because data wasn’t passed cleanly.

And modernization budgets are finite. Stacking regulatory projects burns millions without anyone measuring the benefit. Pathak asked “…how can you bring compliance and fraud checks as part of this ecosystem, rather than sitting on the sidelines as a value-added service?” 

“If you have the right data and good processing tools, an STP (straight-through processing) rate of 98% plus cross-border is possible,” said Von Poser. “…even in a bit of more complex cross-border payments, like shipping or project finance, etc. it’s possible, and that drives down costs…in the long run.” 

A multi-rail, multi-money future 

So what about the future of cross-border payments? What is the solution?  

The future isn’t one winner but, as Mortenson put it, “more horses in the race.” Stablecoins, CBDCs, and tokenized deposits will coexist rather than replace one another.  

Von Poser noted stablecoins still represent “less than half a percent of real payments transactions” per recent McKinsey analysis, “but anyway, I believe they do have a future.” Particularly, he said, in countries that “don’t have a banking system yet, or it has been destroyed by a war.” 

Betting on a single rail is the wrong instinct, and interoperability is the make-or-break. Pathak warned that “if stablecoins create their own island, then we will end up in the same situation by creating more fragmentation … managing another rail without actually getting the real benefit out.” 

Total end-to-end interoperability is “this nirvana, where everything is connected to everything else,” said Eacott, which “sounds … fantastic” and also “sounds massively scary … from a security perspective. But that’s how the internet started.”  

“The real answer is we don’t know yet,” Egnell said. The job is for “the banks, and for Swift, and for everyone else to be ready when that happens.” 

The 2027 deadline

The planning has been done. The infrastructure has been built. The next phase is about implementation: making sure customer value realization sits at the center of every change. The work now is to keep the momentum into 2027 and beyond.