A better cross-border payment experience is here

For years, the industry has worked towards a simple ambition: making cross-border payments feel as seamless as domestic ones.

Today, that ambition is becoming a reality.

In some of the world’s busiest remittance corridors, consumers can now send money across borders with greater speed, transparency and predictability. Payments from Australia to Spain have been completed in as little as 23 seconds, while transfers from Australia to India have arrived in 37 seconds. In addition, payments from China to the United States have been delivered in just a minute.

This progress is being delivered by Swift’s new scheme—a shared framework for retail payments. Through it, participating banks are already delivering a significantly enhanced cross-border experience to customers around the world. Consumers can track their payments from initiation to delivery, receive confirmation when funds arrive, and experience greater transparency on fees and FX charges. 

These early results demonstrate what’s possible when banks come together under a common framework designed around customer outcomes.

From initial corridors to global scale

Over the past month, 26 financial institutions have started processing payments according to Swift’s shared framework, activating 25 payment corridors—routes payments take from one country to another—around the world. Together, they are setting a new benchmark for cross-border retail payments.

Through these corridors, consumers can now send and receive money between 17 activated markets. These include some of the world's highest-volume remittance markets, helping extend the benefits of the framework to corridors where demand for fast, transparent and predictable cross-border payments is greatest.

Participating countries include Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the UAE, the UK and the US.

The Swift scheme: A new framework for cross-border retail payments

This new framework is designed to address persistent frictions in cross-border retail payments. It establishes a common benchmark for customer experience while accelerating the last mile of payment delivery, including instant settlement where domestic infrastructure allows.

More than 70 financial institutions have committed to implementing it in 2026, scaling these benefits to more customers and markets around the world.

A key milestone for cross-border payments

With the G20 deadlines for enhancing cross-border payments approaching in 2027, the framework demonstrates that meaningful improvements can be delivered today, at scale and across real-world payment corridors.

It marks an important shift in cross-border transactions. Rather than asking consumers to wait for future solutions, participating banks can already deliver a better payments experience today through the reach, resilience and trust of the Swift network.

Connecting more than 11,500 financial institutions across over 200 countries and territories and four billion accounts, Swift brings together global reach, operational resilience and trusted infrastructure to support cross-border payments at scale.

While the framework is helping to raise the standard of cross-border payments travelling over today’s rails, we’re also developing a blockchain-based ledger to support the exchange of digital assets and help enable future cross-border transactions.

Nine months since the initial announcement, the ledger is ready for initial use. Seventeen early adopter institutions around the world are preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenised deposits, marking the next step in bringing digital value into the regulated global financial system.

As more banks go live on our payments framework and additional corridors are activated, these benefits will reach more customers around the world—raising the standard for cross-border retail payments and delivering a more consistent, predictable and transparent experience wherever money moves across borders.