Cross-border B2B payments still take three to five days and cost an average of 6.3% of the transaction value. That cost includes foreign exchange markups, correspondent banking fees, and compliance charges, according to the World Bank’s 2025 data on international payment costs. For a manufacturer in Vietnam paying a $100,000 invoice to a supplier in Germany, the total cost of the payment, including time value of money during the settlement window, exceeds $7,000. The business case for fixing this problem has existed for decades. The technology to fix it is now arriving.
Why Cross-Border Payments Are Still Expensive
The legacy system for cross-border payments is the correspondent banking network. A bank in Ho Chi Minh City that needs to send dollars to a bank in Frankfurt routes the payment through one or more intermediary banks. Each intermediary takes a cut, typically $15 to $50 per transaction plus an FX spread of 0.5% to 2%. The payment passes through SWIFT messaging, which coordinates instructions between banks but does not move money. The actual settlement happens through central bank clearing systems, which operate on different schedules in different time zones.
The correspondent banking model was designed for a world where most international payments were large (above $100,000) and infrequent. It works tolerably for those transactions. It works poorly for the growing volume of smaller, more frequent cross-border B2B payments driven by global supply chains, remote workforces, and digital commerce.
The global digital payments market is projected to hit $20 trillion, and cross-border B2B payments represent the largest underserved segment of that market. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that cross-border payment flows total $150 trillion annually, with B2B accounting for approximately 95% of that volume.
Who Is Building Alternatives
Several categories of companies are attacking the cross-border payment problem from different angles. Wise (formerly TransferWise) is the largest independent cross-border payment platform. It processed $118 billion in cross-border volume in fiscal year 2025 and charged an average fee of 0.62%, according to its annual report. Wise achieves lower fees by maintaining local bank accounts in 80 countries and netting payments within each corridor, reducing the need for actual cross-border transfers.
Airwallex, valued at $5.5 billion, provides cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses. Its clients include Brex, Qantas, and Navan. Airwallex operates licensed payment entities in 20 markets, allowing it to process payments locally and settle in local currency. Payoneer, publicly listed, focuses on marketplace sellers and freelancers who receive cross-border payments. It processed $73 billion in volume in 2025.
Traditional banks are also investing. JPMorgan launched Kinexys (formerly Onyx), a blockchain-based payment network that settles cross-border transactions in real time using tokenized deposits. HSBC launched FX Everywhere, a blockchain platform for internal foreign exchange settlements that has processed $5 trillion since launch, per HSBC’s innovation page.
Fintech platforms are growing faster than traditional banks, and cross-border payments is one of the areas where fintech platforms offer the most measurable improvement over incumbent solutions.
Real-Time Cross-Border Payment Networks
The most promising structural change is the emergence of bilateral and multilateral real-time payment connections between countries. Singapore’s PayNow links to Thailand’s PromptPay, India’s UPI, Malaysia’s DuitNow, and Indonesia’s QRIS. The Bank for International Settlements’ Project Nexus aims to connect domestic instant payment systems globally by 2027.
These connections are consumer-focused initially but have B2B implications. A Singapore-based company paying a Thai supplier could potentially settle through PayNow-PromptPay rails at negligible cost and in seconds. The current limitations are transaction size caps (typically $5,000 to $50,000) and business account eligibility, both of which regulators are working to expand.
SWIFT itself is adapting. SWIFT gpi (Global Payments Innovation) launched in 2017 and now covers 96% of SWIFT payment traffic. SWIFT gpi reduced the average cross-border payment time from five days to under 24 hours for 50% of transactions, per SWIFT’s data. But under 24 hours is not instant, and the fees remain high because the correspondent banking model is unchanged underneath.
The Stablecoin Bridge
Stablecoins offer another path. A company can convert local currency to USDC, send the USDC to a recipient in another country via blockchain, and the recipient converts to local currency. The entire process takes under 10 minutes and costs under $1 in network fees. Circle, the issuer of USDC, reported that $12 trillion in on-chain USDC transactions occurred in 2025, and a growing share represents commercial payments rather than crypto trading.
Fintech investment surpassed $210 billion in recent years, and cross-border payment and stablecoin infrastructure companies have attracted significant funding. Bridge, a stablecoin payment infrastructure company, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in 2024. That acquisition signaled Stripe’s intention to use stablecoins as a settlement layer for cross-border payments.
The Size of the Opportunity
McKinsey estimated that cross-border payment revenues totaled $240 billion in 2025. If technology reduces the average cost from 6.3% to 1%, the revenue pool shrinks, but the volume increases as lower costs enable transactions that were previously uneconomical. A $500 cross-border payment that costs $31.50 in fees might not happen. The same payment at $5 is trivial.
The global fintech market is expected to reach $556 billion by 2030, and cross-border payment optimization is one of the largest revenue opportunities within that figure. Fintech is reshaping the $300 trillion global financial services industry, and the $150 trillion cross-border payment market is one of the last major segments still operating on infrastructure built in the 1970s.
The correspondent banking model will not disappear overnight. Regulatory requirements, banking relationships, and institutional inertia keep it in place. But the share of cross-border B2B payments processed through fintech platforms, real-time payment networks, and stablecoin rails is growing. The three-to-five-day settlement window is no longer a technical necessity. It is an artifact of legacy infrastructure that is being replaced, one corridor at a time.
