Real-Time Payments as Core Infrastructure: Accelerating the Shift to Instant, Borderless Transactions

Cross-border payments continue to face persistent challenges related to cost, speed, access, and transparency. Progress against global affordability targets remains slow. The United Nations has set a target for remittance transaction costs to fall below 3.00 percent by 2030. However, according to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide Report (Issue 53, March 2025), the current global average cost remains approximately 6.49 percent.

Industry initiatives have improved parts of the experience, especially tracking and transparency, but the bigger challenge on how to make cross-border payments feel as immediate and predictable as domestic real-time payments, at global scale remains.

To achieve lower-cost, high-speed cross-border payments while ensuring true global accessibility for financial institutions worldwide, modern payment infrastructures must fundamentally rethink how money moves between countries.

Defining Borderless Payment

A borderless payment is a cross-border transaction designed to move funds with minimal delay and friction, reducing the operational risk that comes with long settlement chains.

Enabling Technologies Powering Borderless Payments

The idea of a borderless payment network is to create a globally interconnected system that enables instant or near-instant payment processing by linking fragmented financial systems across different financial institutions and fintech service providers worldwide. By integrating these systems into a single global network, it can provide access to financial institutions and fintech service providers regardless of whether they have direct correspondent relationships outside their country borders.

This approach supports the four key goals of lower cost, greater speed, broader access, and improved transparency.

Borderless Payment Vision

By combining evolving infrastructure such as Swift Global with the ability to repurpose existing card networks, together with fintech-powered local routing and closed-loop systems, as well as blockchain-based infrastructures for peer-to-peer payments, we can build one globally accessible network that supports different types of payments.

This network can serve both cross-border and domestic payments instantly, at a fraction of the costs currently imposed by individual, single payment networks.

A Single Data Language

As financial institutions move to ISO 20022, the industry gains a richer and more structured data model that supports better automation, screening, and exception handling across the payment lifecycle. This matters because cross-border friction often comes from data gaps, not just network speed.

Interlinking Instant Payment Systems

While nearly all countries are either already operating or implementing national instant payment infrastructure for moving money between financial and fintech institutions locally, linking these networks regionally and globally is increasingly gaining acceptance. We have already seen multiple examples of instant payment links across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and we expect similar developments to occur in the Americas and East Asia over the next few years.

Cloud-ready Infrastructure for Faster Connectivity

Another technology that supports and reinforces our predictions is the rapid adoption of cloud-based financial infrastructures, which helps eliminate geographical barriers among financial and fintech providers worldwide and simplifies connections with cross border partners and correspondents.

Open Banking and APIs for Integration

As Open Banking ecosystems mature, API-driven connectivity will also promote faster adoption and more reliable linkages between different parties.

AI-assisted Controls for Real-time Risk

Additionally, AI-based real-time fraud detection and enhanced compliance measures will strengthen trust in the global payments’ infrastructure.

Blockchain Models

Finally, blockchain technology, which has been proven in multiple implementations around the world to provide efficient, high performance, and highly transparent solutions, will continue to play a key role in building a globally unified multi-party network.

Regulatory and Compliance Barriers to Global Integration

Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) are among the top challenges facing financial institutions in complying with local regulations. Since different countries impose varying thresholds and documentation requirements, conflicts can arise when payment transactions are processed for AML screening across borders.

Another compliance challenge involves the licensing and regulatory requirements that determine whether a financial institution or fintech can operate and process payments in multiple countries.

Additionally, taxation and reporting requirements differ from one country to another, which can impact both transaction costs and accessibility.

The Strategic Role of a Payments Hub

A payments hub solution can serve as a bridge between different countries’ instant payment systems, enabling inter-country transfers at the central bank link level.

This solution can also function as an intermediary, facilitating transfers between correspondent banks across countries by leveraging existing Swift infrastructure.

Furthermore, a payments hub powered by an AI engine can automatically select the optimal omni-channel route for a cross-border payment, minimizing costs and maximizing the speed of settlement.

Conclusion

By linking existing local instant payment infrastructures and bridging them through repurposed money transfer and card networks, we can build a truly global borderless payments ecosystem. Reducing settlement times between financial institutions and fintech service providers will help lower overall payment costs and accelerate the availability of funds in consumer account balances.

Leveraging internationally accepted and progressively evolving standards will enhance transaction transparency, thereby increasing adoption and access to the global network. While pursuing these benefits, several compliance challenges must be addressed to narrow the gaps in KYC, AML, and regulatory requirements across different countries and jurisdictions.