India is at the forefront of payments innovation. A decade ago, it introduced its Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a real-time payment system that has completely transformed how people transact and raised the bar for speed, transparency and access of making domestic payments.
Now, as the world’s fastest growing major economy and largest recipient of in-bound remittances, it has set an ambition to make cross-border transactions just as seamless and simple as domestic transactions. In its Payments Vision 2025, The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) outlined an ambition to “propel our payment systems further”, aligned with the G20 goals for enhanced speed, cost, access and transparency of cross-border transactions.
A shared ambition for cross-border payment modernisation
Swift shares the RBI’s ambition to modernise cross-border payments in line with the G20 goals. We’ve been supporting India’s integration into the global financial ecosystem for more than 30 years, providing the connectivity to enable value to flow seamlessly between 200 countries, 11,500 institutions and 4 billion accounts. The Swift India joint venture has also driven positive change in the domestic market for the past 10 years.
By working with our global community through implementation of ISO 20022 rich data and advanced capabilities in recent years, we have already significantly improved speed and transparency. In fact, 75% of payments on Swift’s network reach beneficiary banks within 10 minutes – often in seconds – well ahead of the G20’s 2027 speed targets.
We’re now going even further to bring the benefits of speed, certainty and simplicity to end customers – and the Indian financial community is playing an integral role.
Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and State Bank of India (SBI) are part of a pioneering group of banks around the world who are working with us on a consumer-originated payments scheme to define new rules that will deliver:
- A better end to end payments experience for consumers
- Certainty and transparency on the amount to be received, and the cost and delivery time prior to payment initiation
- Faster processing with instant settlement where local infrastructures allow and 24/7 availability
- Confidence and trust by providing end-to-end tracking, stop-and-recall capabilities and robust dispute mechanisms to preserve consumer protection
This will not just benefit transactions on Swift, but also those moving beyond.
For example, as India pursues the interlinking of UPI with other payment systems globally, the payments scheme will complement this by combining the efficient re-use of existing cross-border infrastructure with pre-agreed standards and service expectations. The payments scheme will enable Indian consumers to benefit early from a transformed consumer-originated payments experience, delivering faster, more transparent and more predictable cross-border transactions.
And that collaboration is important not just among banks and the private sector, but with the public sector too. Our research, published in September 2025, found that, on average, 80% of the total time of a cross-border transaction is in the last mile, after a payment arrives at the beneficiary bank. This is due to factors including regulatory reporting requirements, risk controls set by individual countries, manual processes and a lack of a real 24/7 infrastructure.
The RBI has been at the forefront of addressing these challenges. In a November draft circular that set out a series of steps to tackle last mile frictions, it noted that “one of the challenges with speed of cross-border payments is the delay between receipt of the payment at the beneficiary bank and credit to the beneficiary account.”
Swift as an enabler of 24/7 cross-border connectivity
Today, India processes more than 20 billion digital and real-time payment transactions each month across platforms such as IMPS, NEFT and UPI. As Indian corporates expand internationally and remittance flows accelerate, customers will expect the same immediacy and transparency for cross-border payments that they experience domestically.
Meeting those expectations requires 24/7 connectivity across borders and a unity of common standards and processes. Establishing consistent, globally interoperable standards, such as those underpinning our payments scheme, requires close collaboration between regulators, banks and market infrastructures.
This collaboration dramatically improves today’s cross-border payment experience at scale. It also ensures as many people as possible can benefit from immediacy and certainty, while laying the foundation for the future of digital commerce.
For Swift, the focus is to sustain this strong momentum while preparing for what comes next. By continuing to evolve our platform – including integrating a blockchain-based ledger to support new forms of value – we are future-proofing the payments experience.
Ultimately, that means people in India and around the world can send money anywhere, between anyone, in any form, with immediacy, transparency and certainty – all built on a foundation that meets the highest standards of security, resilience, operational excellence and trust.
Making cross-border payments as seamless as domestic ones
Find out how we’re transforming the cross-border payments experience for consumer and SME clients.
