Cross-Border Payment Goals Stall Despite Banking, FinTech and Stablecoin Innovations

Five years ago, the G20 nations set out an ambitious goal: to make international payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible by 2027.

The vision was bold but supported by a marketplace committed to innovation. Still, as the most recent 2025 progress report from the Financial Stability Board (FSB) shows, the finish line of quantitative targets remains distant.

While some regions are seeing faster transactions, global cross-border payment averages have barely budged from their existing benchmarks over the past two years.

Behind the report’s standstill metrics sits a paradox of progress. Innovation in cross-border payment capabilities is occurring, but it’s happening in silos such as moving money between Europe and the U.S., or remittance flows to South Asia.

Despite a flurry of policy breakthroughs and technical milestones, the world’s payment systems remain fragmented, with persistent frictions that make transferring money across borders costly and slow.

The ultimate verdict? Technology alone is unlikely to solve the problem. New payment networks are emerging, but interoperability remains elusive. Structural barriers, including legal, regulatory and supervisory bottlenecks, continue to slow implementation.

The next phase of progress may depend less on incremental upgrades and more on political courage to harmonize rules, share data responsibly and accept a degree of interdependence in financial infrastructure.

The defining paradox of cross-border innovation may be that global efficiency requires national compromise around incentives, infrastructure and identity.

See also: How the Consumerization of X-Border Payments Is Reshaping Corporate Treasury

Data, Regulation and the Drag of Misalignment

The FSB’s goals include cutting average transaction costs to less than 3%, delivering payments within one hour and extending payment access to more than 90% of the world’s adult population. The report identified fragmented regulation as perhaps single greatest impediment to progress. While countries nominally agree on global standards such as anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) frameworks, their local implementations vary wildly.

The result is a maze of overlapping compliance obligations that make cross-border interoperability expensive and uncertain.

For example, differing data-privacy rules prevent sharing of customer information needed for streamlined know your customer (KYC) processes. Some jurisdictions prohibit storage of personal data abroad, undermining centralized or shared KYC utilities. Meanwhile, political sensitivities around digital sovereignty make regulators wary of relying on third-party infrastructure hosted in foreign data centers.

Capital controls are another bottleneck. In some countries, funds can be held up for days while authorities verify the purpose of transactions or the legitimacy of recipients. Large banks have the scale and resources to manage these burdens. Smaller FinTechs or regional banks often cannot. Many have resorted to “de-risking” by terminating correspondent relationships with institutions in higher-risk jurisdictions rather than navigating the compliance labyrinth.

At the same time, recommendations to harmonize supervision of bank and nonbank payment service providers (PSPs) are still in early implementation. While banks are tightly regulated, FinTech and nonbank players face a patchwork of licensing and compliance regimes. This regulatory asymmetry can both limit competition and perpetuate inefficiencies in corridors where nonbanks could bring innovation and lower costs.

Throughout the report, one theme recurred: the critical role of private-sector execution. Global institutions can design frameworks, but only banks, FinTechs and infrastructure operators can operationalize them.

Read more: What Cross-Border CFOs Need to Know About Stablecoin Bridging

Opportunities at the Frontier in Cross-Border Growth

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi collaboration “The Treasury Management Playbook: Spotlight on Cross-Border Payments” found cross-border payments are more important than ever and that companies are looking to minimize the frictions associated with international transactions.

The report found that the three most commonly cited pain points are slow speeds, lack of transparency and high costs, and that the more a business looks abroad for new markets and customers, the more important seamless and efficient cross-border payments become.

What emerged from the G20’s uneven progress is not a failure of ambition but a divergence of trajectories. Economies with strong digital public infrastructure, proactive regulators and political commitment to openness are accelerating. Others, constrained by legacy frameworks or sovereignty concerns, are lagging.

“One thing that all treasury organizations are looking for is visibility into their global activity,” Sebastian Sintes, director of transactional FX at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Sept. 8.

“For the corporate organizations that have been making some heavy investments into their system infrastructure, that return on that investment is going to start to be felt in the upcoming years,” he said.

If policymakers and market players seize the opportunity to standardize and connect, the G20’s unfulfilled roadmap could still chart a route to something revolutionary: a truly global financial internet.