Cross-Border Payments Statistics 2026: $190 Trillion in Flows

Cross-border payments moved $190 trillion in value in 2023, approximately 190% of global GDP, according to IMF research published in 2025. Wholesale transfers between financial institutions and corporations accounted for about $146 trillion of that total, 77% of the market, leaving about $45 trillion in the retail segment.

Five years into the G20 programme to make those payments faster and cheaper, the Financial Stability Board reported that it is unlikely satisfactory improvements at the global level will be achieved in line with the 2027 Roadmap timetable. The cross-border payments statistics below draw on the indicators the FSB and SWIFT track and on the World Bank’s remittance price series. They also cover the FXC Intelligence provider panel and the volume growth reported by Visa, Mastercard and Wise.

Key Takeaways

• The 2025 key performance indicators show only a slight improvement at the global level since the KPIs were first calculated in 2023, which is the clearest signal yet that policy completion has not reached end users.
• Wholesale speed recovered to 54.6% of payments credited within one hour in 2025, after slipping to 50.6% in 2024.
• The gain came from the receiving bank rather than the network: the beneficiary leg rose 5.4 pp to 61.7%, while the in-flight leg fell 1.9 pp to 88.5%.
• Person-to-person transfers remain the most expensive retail use case at 2.5% average cost, approximately stable since 2023.
• Per World Bank pricing data, the global average remittance price fell to 6.36% in Q3 2025 from 6.49% in Q1 2025, leaving it more than twice the G20 objective.
• Provider churn is large enough to distort the trend: the provider panel recorded a 45.9% loss rate between the 2024 and 2025 samples.

Editor’s Choice

• Total flows: $190 trillion in cross-border payment value in 2023.
• Wholesale segment: about $146 trillion, 77% of the total market.
• Wholesale reliability: 93.2% of wholesale cross-border payments credited within one business day in 2025.
• Retail speed: 35.4% of retail payment services settle within one hour.
• Bank remittance cost: banks average 14.99%, the most expensive provider type.
• Card network growth: Visa total cross-border volume up 13% in fiscal Q3 2026.
• Challenger scale: $243 billion moved by Wise customers in FY2026.

Global Cross-Border Payment Value by Segment

• According to IMF figures, the headline number measures value moved rather than industry revenue: the $190 trillion total represents approximately 190% of global GDP.
• Inside the wholesale segment, about 80% of large business-to-business payments are conducted by banks and investors and 18% by hedge funds and trading firms.
• Per IMF estimates, retail is dominated by companies rather than consumers: nearly 85% of retail cross-border payments are B2B payments.
• Consumer-facing flows are a thin slice. C2B transactions account for about 7%, B2C for 4%, and C2C for 4% of total retail payments.
• Family transfers sit inside that slice: remittances constitute nearly half of all C2C cross-border payments.
• The wholesale estimate carries the widest error bars, since the wholesale segment is particularly difficult to estimate due to its opacity.
• A separate addressable-market figure circulates alongside it: Wise cites roughly $43 trillion moved across borders by people and businesses every year, a narrower population than the IMF total.
• Institutional flows dominate the picture, which is why the cross-border banking data sits closer to this total than any consumer series does.

Source: International Monetary Fund Fintech Note 2025

About This Data

Compiled from 15 primary sources, all Tier 1 regulators, multilateral organizations, or company-filing material, published between July 2024 and July 2026. A source is qualified only if it published the figure itself rather than restating another party’s number. Figures are reviewed on a rolling basis and updated when the underlying institutions publish new editions.

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Read by pros at Visa, Mastercard, Vanguard, and the FDIC.

What is the current size of the global cross-border payments market?

Two different quantities answer this question, and they differ by three orders of magnitude. The value of payments crossing borders reached $190 trillion in 2023. The market for cross-border payment services, meaning the fees and software revenue earned on those flows, is quoted in the low hundreds of billions instead. Quoting one number in place of the other is the most common error on this topic.

Wholesale Cross-Border Payment Speed by Processing Leg

• The G20 monitoring definition is a value threshold: wholesale payments are defined as payments with a value greater than or equal to $100,000.
• End-to-end performance improved in the latest cycle, with 54.6% of wholesale payments credited within one hour, up 4 pp year on year.
• The receiving side did the work: the beneficiary leg reached 61.7% within one hour, a 5.4 pp gain.
• The network leg moved backwards, since the in-flight leg slipped 1.9 pp to 88.5%.
• Over a full business day, the in-flight leg is effectively solved: 99.7% of wholesale payments cleared the in-flight leg within one business day in each of 2023, 2024 and 2025.
• The beneficiary leg lags on the same measure at 93.8% within one business day in 2025, against 92.7% in 2024.
• According to SWIFT, which supplies the underlying observations, both wholesale speed indicators draw on the same network sample.

Recent Developments

• June 2026: Wise reported FY2026 cross-border volume of $243 billion and a 21% increase in active customers to 19 million.
• June 2026: Wise went live with two new direct connections in Brazil and Japan.
• April 2026: Wise added Capitec to its Wise Platform partnerships.
• July 2026: Visa reported fiscal third quarter 2026 net revenue of $11.6 billion, an increase of 14%.
• July 2026: Visa total cross-border volume grew 13% in constant dollars, with volume excluding intra-Europe up 12%.
• July 2026: Mastercard reported second quarter 2026 cross-border volume growth of 12% on a local currency basis and gross dollar volume of $2.9 trillion.

Wholesale Speed Against the G20 2027 Targets

• The target date is fixed, and most of the G20’s quantitative targets share a common target date of end-2027.
• The one-hour measure has not moved in a straight line: it ran 53.8% in 2023, 50.6% in 2024, and 54.6% in 2025.
• The one-business-day measure is steadier at 92.7% in 2023, 92% in 2024, and 93.2% in 2025.
• Access held up across the same window, with the KPIs indicating that access to cross-border payments remains broad.
• The FSB’s own verdict is blunt: it is unlikely that satisfactory improvements at the global level will be achieved in line with the 2027 Roadmap timetable.
• The policy work itself is largely finished, because the FSB and partner organisations have completed most of the international policy work under the G20 Roadmap, as set out in its consolidated 2025 progress report.
• Two years of runway remain against a measure that has gained less than one percentage point since the baseline. The constraint is jurisdictional adoption, and that clock runs slower than the target date assumes.

Cross-Border Payment Costs by Use Case

• Small-business payments are the cheapest category, at 1.6% average cost for B2B MSME cross-border transactions in 2025.
• Business-to-person payments improved, falling 0.2 pp to 1.8%.
• Person-to-business payments edged down to 1.9%, a 0.1 pp decline.
• Person-to-person transfers outside remittances stayed highest, remaining approximately stable at 2.5%.
• That use case also concentrates the expensive corridors, with around 30% of P2P corridors costly, a share that has remained stable since 2023.
• Senders paying above the target rate can compare the pattern against the priciest corridors on record, where the same use-case gap repeats.
• FXC Intelligence supplies the provider-level pricing behind all four use-case indicators.

By the numbers: Across the four retail use cases the Financial Stability Board tracks, average cost moved by at most 0.2 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, and the B2B figure did not move at all. Three years of coordinated international policy work have produced a pricing picture that is close to flat.

How Cost KPIs Moved From 2023 to 2025

• The corridor measure deteriorated then partly recovered: 18.3% of corridors carried costs higher than 3% in 2023, 24.1% in 2024 and 23.7% in 2025.
• B2B pricing rose once and then held, running at 1.5% in 2023 before settling at 1.6% in both 2024 and 2025.
• B2P pricing was the most volatile line, moving from 1.7% in 2023 to 2.0% in 2024 and back to 1.8% in 2025.
• P2B pricing has drifted down slowly, from 2.0% in both 2023 and 2024 to 1.9% in 2025.
• P2P pricing has been the flattest line of the four, at 2.6%, 2.6%, and approximately 2.5% across the three cycles.
• A 5.8-point jump in expensive corridors during 2024 that barely reverses in 2025 is not a pricing trend. It is what happens when the corridor sample is rebuilt underneath the measure.

Source: Financial Stability Board and FXC Intelligence, March 2025

Remittance Costs by Pricing Benchmark

• The headline series improved slightly, with the Global Average falling from 6.49% in Q1 2025 to 6.36% in Q3 2025.
• Money transfer operators priced well below the average, as the International MTO Index decreased to 5.52% from 5.91% in Q1 2025.
• Digital channels were cheaper again, since the Digital remittances index decreased to 4.59% from 4.85%, a gap that the digital remittance pricing data tracks corridor by corridor.
• Digital-only operators were cheapest among provider types, at 3.54%, down from 3.55% in Q1 2025.
• Banks remain the outlier, because banks average 14.99%, the most expensive type of service provider.
• An informed sender does far better than the average, given that the Global SmaRT Average remained the same at 3.29% in Q3 2025.
• Card rails now lead on origination, with credit and debit cards the lowest-cost instrument to originate remittances, averaging 4.39%.
• Corridor-level coverage is wide, and RPW covers 48 remittance sending countries and 102 receiving countries, for a total of 358 country corridors.

Remittance Cost by Send Amount and the 3% Target

• Smaller transfers cost proportionally more, with the global average cost for sending $200 at 6.5% and for $500 at 4.3%.
• Both sit above the objective, since the G20 commitment is to reduce the global average to 3%.
• Speed improved on this measure, as the global share of remittance services making funds available within one hour increased to 54.4%.
• Channel choice still decides the price, because digital remittance services continued to be cheaper on average than cash-based services in 2025.
• Funding method matters at the margin: mobile money was the lowest-cost instrument for funding remittance transactions.
• Disbursement follows the same pattern, with debit cards the most affordable means of disbursing funds.
• The informed-consumer benchmark weakened in places, as the share of corridors with SmaRT averages above 5% increased for sending both $200 and $500.
• Long-run progress is real, since the proportion of corridors with average costs of less than 5% rose from 17% in Q1 2009 to 83% in Q3 2025, a trajectory the broader global remittance figures set in context.

Retail Payment Speed, Transparency and Access

• The one-hour measure improved marginally, rising 1.9 pp to 35.4%.
• The one-business-day measure went the other way, declining 1.7 pp to 67.3%, continuing a total decline of 6.7 pp over the observation period.
• Use-case spread is wide: more than two-thirds of P2P payments settled within one business day and almost half within one hour.
• Business use cases trail badly. For B2B and B2P, less than 45% of payments settled within one business day.
• Disclosure improved from a low base, as the share of cost-transparent providers also transparent about payment speed increased 7.3 pp to 62.9%.
• Business access has plateaued, since the share of MSMEs with a transaction account at a regulated financial institution remained broadly unchanged since 2023 at around 90%.
• Consumer access is still climbing, with the share of adults holding such an account up 4.9 pp since 2022 to 78.7%.

Source: Financial Stability Board, 2025 KPI cycle

Card Network Cross-Border Volume Growth

• Visa’s cross-border line outpaced its domestic one, with total cross-border volume up 13% in constant dollars against payments volume up 10%.
• Stripping out intra-European activity lowers it slightly, to 12% growth excluding transactions within Europe.
• Transaction counts grew in line with volume, as processed transactions rose 10%.
• Revenue followed, since Visa net revenue reached $11.6 billion, an increase of 14%, or 13% on a constant-dollar basis.
• Mastercard‘s cross-border line ran well ahead of its domestic line, at 12% cross-border growth against gross dollar volume growth of 8%.
• Switched transactions grew more slowly, at 9%.
• Scale context sits in the volume base, with Mastercard gross dollar volume reaching $2.9 trillion, a series the Visa network statistics page tracks alongside its closest peer.

How Many Providers and Corridors the Cross-Border Payments Statistics Cover

• The provider panel shrank year on year, from 687 payment service providers in 2024 to 634 in 2025.
• Turnover inside that panel was heavy, with 249 new providers added and 303 lost.
• In percentage terms, that is 37.7% new and 45.9% lost.
• The person-to-business panel churned hardest, at 50.5% new providers and 60.7% lost.
• Corridor coverage collapsed in one use case, because P2B fell from 5,739 corridors in 2024 to 4,739 in 2025, losing 1,000 corridors with none added.
• The P2P panel was steadier, moving from 3,464 corridors to 3,407.
• Business corridors barely moved, at 2,134 in 2024 and 2,127 in 2025.

Source: Financial Stability Board and FXC Intelligence, 2025

Worth noting: A panel with a 45.9% provider loss rate and 1,000 lost corridors in a single use case is not measuring the same market twice. Part of every year-on-year movement in the retail cost and speed KPIs is composition change, and the Financial Stability Board says so directly in its own notes.

Non-Bank Challengers and the Take-Rate Squeeze

• Volume growth continues at scale, with 19 million people and businesses moving $243 billion across borders in FY2026.
• Pricing keeps falling, since the average take rate was 52 basis points.
• Speed is now the default rather than the premium, as 75% of Q4 payments globally were completed in under 20 seconds.
• The customer base expanded, with active customers up 21% to 19 million.
• Balances are becoming sticky, because customer holdings grew 40% to $39 billion.
• Card usage grew faster still, at 37% to $44 billion in card spend.
• Licensing expanded the addressable footprint, as Wise gained new licence approvals in South Africa, the UAE and Thailand, the kind of build-out the wider money transfer industry data has tracked for a decade.

Source: Wise Group plc FY2026 results, June 2026

Instant Payment System Interlinking Under Project Nexus

• The project targets the structural problem directly, since Nexus seeks to enhance cross-border payments by connecting multiple domestic instant payment systems globally.
• It has moved past the prototype stage because it is the first BIS Innovation Hub project in the payments area to move towards live implementation, per the BIS Project Nexus page.
• Five jurisdictions anchor the build, with central banks and instant payment system operators of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand working towards live implementation, among them the operator behind the UPI transaction data reported each month.
• A sixth participates at one remove, as Bank of Indonesia joined as a special observer.
• The BIS role narrowed as the scheme matured, and the BIS is to play an advisory role as Project Nexus sets up an operational scheme and opens to potential new participants.
• Domestic rails are the binding constraint, which is why the blueprint targets connection of domestic instant payment systems.
• Counting the observer, 6 jurisdictions take part, five working towards live implementation and one attending as a special observer.

Source: Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, 2026

Why is it hard to make cross-border payments in 2026?

The friction is structural rather than technical. The Financial Stability Board names several persistent challenges. They are misaligned anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist-financing controls, privacy rules, inefficient implementation of capital controls, limited transparency for end-users, interoperability challenges, and insufficient competition in certain market segments.

Each of those sits with national authorities rather than with the payment networks. A joint CPMI-FSB monitoring survey found that jurisdictional implementation of policy recommendations on legal, regulatory, and supervisory issues is nascent. That is the gap between a finished rulebook and a faster payment: the international work concluded, and the domestic work has barely started.

What are the downsides of cross-border payments?

Cost and settlement risk fall hardest on the smallest senders. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most expensive region to send money to, at 8.46% total average cost. At the other end, the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region overtook South Asia as the lowest cost receiving region, with an average cost of 5.11%.

Timing is the second drawback. Fewer than half of retail cross-border payment services credit funds within one hour, and 67.3% do so within one business day, so a payment sent on a Friday can still sit in transit over a weekend. For a household depending on a monthly transfer, that delay is a liquidity event, not an inconvenience.

Conclusion

The $190 trillion that crossed borders in 2023 now moves through a system whose rulebook is finished and whose results are not. Wholesale payments got measurably faster in the latest cycle, reaching 54.6% within one hour, while the most expensive retail use case held approximately stable at 2.5% and the global remittance average settled at 6.36%. The people furthest from the targets are the ones the targets were written for: households sending small sums into the most expensive receiving regions, and the small businesses paying above-target rates on routine invoices.

The near-term change is more likely to come from infrastructure than from policy. Instant payment system interlinking and the continued repricing pressure from non-bank providers are the two forces already visible in the data, and both work on the domestic rails where the FSB says the remaining friction lives.