Transforming consumer payments: Banks roll out new framework for retail transactions

Last year, we announced plans to transform the cross-border payment experience with the launch of a new scheme, designed to ensure consistently fast, predictable and transparent payments worldwide. Thanks to progress in 2026, consumers and small businesses receiving payments across a range of countries, including five of the world’s ten largest remittance markets, will be among the first to benefit from a pioneering new framework for cross-border retail transactions.

More than 25 banks have committed to processing payments under this framework by June, affecting payment corridors across Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Germany, India, Pakistan, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the US. As a result, they’ll give customers certainty of cost, full-value delivery, the fastest possible speeds – including instant settlement where possible – and end-to-end traceability when making international transfers. 

Of the initial launch markets, Bangladesh, China, Germany, India and Pakistan are all in the top 10 countries for remittances received, and we expect the activation of more payment routes to follow, ensuring a widespread transformation of account-to-account cross-border transactions.

So far, great progress has been made – 75% of transactions over Swift already reach the destination bank within an hour – ahead of the G20 target. But there’s still more work to be done to improve consistency of payment experience, address financial inclusion, and tackle delays that occur between the payment leaving the Swift network and being credited to the customer.  

While transactions across the Swift network itself can happen in as little as seconds, 80% of a transaction’s average journey is spent in that ‘last mile ’ – the time between a payment arriving at the beneficiary financial institution and being credited to the end account – with factors such as domestic regulations, local market practices and bank and domestic market infrastructure capabilities causing delays. The scheme framework will significantly enhance that final, domestic part of a transaction’s journey.

“The financial community has made strong collective progress to improve the speed and transparency of cross-border payments, but there is room to go further, said Nasir Ahmed, Head of Payments Scheme at Swift. “Everyone should be able to transact internationally at pace, safe in the knowledge that the full value will arrive with the recipient and that the fees will be affordable and fixed from the start. That is what our community is enabling with this initiative. We’re committed to giving everyone the same first-class cross-border payments experience across all markets and all regulated forms of value – whenever, wherever and with full transparency – and we’re pleased to see the global banking community making this possible for their end customers.”