Banking / Settlement

Cross-Border Settlement Speed: Days to Minutes

Cross-border payments still pass through chains of correspondent banks and can take a day or more. Tokenized deposits, stablecoins and shared ledgers settle the same value in seconds, and banks and card networks now run them in production.

Summary

Cross-border settlement is the final transfer of money between banks in different countries. Through correspondent banking it can still take a day or more, because a payment hops through several banks, each with its own cut-off times and compliance checks. Stablecoins and bank-run distributed ledgers shorten the chain by putting both sides on one ledger that runs 24/7.

How it works

The G20 set the benchmark in 2021. The Financial Stability Board's targets call for 75% of cross-border payments to be credited within one hour by end-2027. They also set retail payment costs at 1% by end-2027 and remittance costs at 3% by 2030. In October 2025 the FSB reported that it is "unlikely that satisfactory improvements at the global level will be achieved in line with the 2027 Roadmap timetable". Much of the faster capacity built since then sits outside the correspondent model.

A correspondent payment is a chain of accounts. The sending bank debits its client and instructs a correspondent, and that correspondent may pass the payment to a second one before it reaches the beneficiary's bank. Every hop runs its own sanctions and AML screening. Every bank works to its own time zone and cut-offs, and liquidity sits prefunded in nostro accounts in each currency. A data query at any hop holds up the whole payment, and weekends stop it entirely.

The banks' first answer was to keep the money as deposits and move it on a ledger. J.P. Morgan's Kinexys had processed more than $4 trillion since launch and averaged over $7 billion a day by late June 2026. That month it added the Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi and Singapore dollar to the U.S. dollar, euro and sterling it already supported (CoinDesk, 29 June 2026). Clients can move funds, exchange currencies and manage liquidity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The money stays a J.P. Morgan deposit throughout, so the receiving side is paid the moment the ledger updates.

Stablecoins do a similar job with a token that anyone on the chain can hold, which makes them useful between parties that do not share a bank. Card networks have gone furthest. Visa uses stablecoins to settle daily obligations with card issuers, and on 8 September 2026 it said its stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the level a year earlier (The Block). For a cross-border payment, the stablecoin leg itself is final within seconds. The slow parts move to the edges: converting local currency into the token and back, and the compliance checks at each end.

The public-sector version is Project Agorá, convened by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance. It brought together seven central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions. The central banks are the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The project's report, published on 27 May 2026, found that atomic settlement of cross-border transaction chains, where every leg settles or none does, can be done securely across currencies. It uses tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits, and legal analysis found settlement finality achievable in all seven jurisdictions. The next phase moves to real-value transactions, and the Bank of Canada has joined.

The approaches differ mainly in whose money settles. Kinexys moves commercial bank deposits within one bank's network. A stablecoin is a claim on its issuer and reaches anyone who can hold it. Agorá keeps central bank reserves at the core, with deposits on top. For a corporate treasurer, that choice decides which counterparties can be paid directly and what credit exposure sits in the payment while it is in flight.

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