Cross-border payments need working connections

The international campaign to improve cross-border payments is struggling to translate agreed reforms into cheaper, faster services. The Financial Stability Board’s October 2025 progress assessment found only limited global improvement since its indicators began in 2023 and warned that satisfactory progress was unlikely on the roadmap’s 2027 timetable. That assessment supplies a historical benchmark for the implementation measures announced during 2026.

The response during 2026 has put greater emphasis on implementation. At its March summit, the FSB said it would ask members for national and regional action plans setting out practical priorities. It also called for closer cooperation between public authorities and the payments industry. The plans could make responsibilities more explicit: which authority or operator must change a process, and whose cooperation it needs.

For banks and payment companies, the difficulty is deciding which investments they can justify on their own. A firm can modernise its own system without controlling the receiving institution, the currency-conversion arrangement or the rules governing data along the route. The payoff from an investment can depend on changes elsewhere. A project that looks attractive across the whole chain may be harder to organise among its separate participants.

Making richer messages usable

In July, FSB deputy secretary general Martin Moloney identified fragmented authority, differing incentives and dependence on foreign-exchange markets among the obstacles. He also argued that common payment-message formats must be embedded in screening, reconciliation and other operations, rather than treated simply as a conversion exercise. These were his remarks, expressly qualified as not necessarily representing the views of the FSB or its members.

Richer messages help only when the institutions handling a payment can use the information they contain. If useful data are lost, handled inconsistently or separated from the process that resolves a problem, a modern format alone cannot deliver the expected benefit. Standardisation is valuable because it can reduce repeated interpretation; its value depends on consistent use.

One approach is to connect domestic instant-payment systems through a shared framework. The Bank for International Settlements describes Project Nexus as allowing an operator to make one connection to a platform that reaches other participating systems, instead of creating a separate bespoke link for every country. Its work produced a prototype and a technical and governance blueprint, and the BIS says the project has been handed to Nexus Global Payments for implementation.

Bank Indonesia announced its full participation on February 2nd 2026, having previously been a special observer. It said it would develop BI-FAST’s connection to Nexus alongside the other participating central banks. The statement described anticipated improvements in efficiency and affordability from the planned connection. The announcement does not establish that every envisaged Nexus route is already carrying customer payments.

The model tackles a specific source of repeated work. A common connection and scheme can reduce the need to negotiate every technical detail anew between each pair of systems. A working international service also requires agreement about how participants behave and which information travels with the payment. Responsibility for an exception must be as clear to the participants as the process for a successful payment.

That suggests a more useful way to judge progress. Count usable routes, dependable service and changes in the cost and speed experienced by customers, alongside technical milestones. Distinguish a demonstration from a production service and an operating service from broad adoption. The FSB’s own gap between policy milestones and global outcomes makes those distinctions necessary.

The action plans and Nexus address different parts of the same problem. The plans can assign work within jurisdictions; the shared platform can reduce duplication between systems. Neither removes the need to coordinate foreign exchange, data handling and exceptions across the entire route. That is where an agreed reform becomes a usable payment service, and where progress towards the 2027 targets has to be measured.