A new report from the US Faster Payments Council identifies seven barriers holding back global B2B transactions and makes the case for real-time infrastructure as the fix
Cross-border B2B payments are the plumbing of global trade. They are functional, largely invisible, and often taken for granted until something goes wrong. Delays, opaque costs, and poor remittance data are a daily reality for businesses trading internationally, and the time lost chasing reconciliation errors rarely shows up on a balance sheet but is felt keenly nonetheless.
A new report from the U.S. Faster Payments Council (FPC), developed by its Cross-Border Payments Work Group and sponsored by Mastercard, sets out to map exactly why that is and what the industry can do to improve the cross-border B2B payments experience.
Published this week, B2B Cross-Border Payments: Expert Insights on Faster Payments Adoption draws on interviews with practitioners across major financial institutions and fintech providers to identify seven core challenges holding back the market.
The seven fault lines in B2B payments
The challenges highlighted will likely be familiar to those who have worked in corporate treasury or international trade finance: slow settlement, high and unpredictable processing costs, fragmented infrastructure, poor remittance data, foreign exchange friction, compliance burdens, and fraud risk.
Settlement speed: Traditional correspondent banking can hold funds in transit for days, creating counterparty risk and tying up working capital. This stops institutions like Ken Wong’s multinational investment bank from operating on weekends, though 24/7 settlement would remove “latency problems [associated] with moving money over traditional wires.”
Processing costs: Multiple intermediaries, FX spreads and compliance checks inflate costs unpredictably. Consolidating infrastructure and introducing real-time FX capabilities can make cross-border transaction pricing significantly more transparent.
Fragmented infrastructure: Inconsistent payment rails and limited interoperability between systems force businesses to navigate a patchwork of networks. Chinnapa Reddy Yeruva, formerly of a major British retail and commercial bank, described building a payments hub that incorporated all available rails with intelligent routing and API integration for new capabilities to navigate this fragmentation.
Data gaps: Poor remittance data makes automated reconciliation difficult. ISO20022 is designed to solve this, but as Wong cautioned in the report, financial institutions do not yet use its richer data fields consistently.
FX and liquidity friction: Pre-funding requirements tie up working capital while clearing delays create rate uncertainty. Jhacco Castro, from an American financial services organisation supporting fintech infrastructure, described in the report how FX providers manage liquidity across multiple accounts to enable real-time payments without funds sitting idle in intermediary pools.
Compliance burdens: Duplicative KYC and AML checks across jurisdictions add overhead and slow transactions. Standardised compliance frameworks and automated processes built into faster payment infrastructure can reduce this significantly.
Fraud risk: Faster rails raise legitimate questions about whether security keeps pace with speed. Yeruva said all rails must be equally protected, with an enterprise fraud solution applied consistently across the infrastructure rather than as uneven bolt-on controls.
Stablecoins, programmable money and the evolving toolkit
Beyond the immediate operational fixes, the report examines how newer technologies like stablecoins are beginning to reshape the architecture of cross-border B2B payments.
This is particularly true of dollar-backed stablecoin options, which are gaining significant traction in emerging markets where currency volatility makes holding local currency a risk. Peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers can bypass correspondent banking entirely, and fintechs such as Circle are building direct infrastructure around them.
The concept of programmable or conditional payments, where funds are released automatically once predefined conditions are met, is also drawing interest as a mechanism for reducing the trust friction that complicates complex B2B payments transactions. Meanwhile, initiatives such as BIS Project Nexus are working to connect domestic real-time payment networks into a single global hub, with a target of 2026.
The report is careful not to frame these developments as a straightforward competition between stablecoins and instant payment networks. In practice, fintechs frequently complement legacy systems rather than replace them, and financial institutions are increasingly treating them as partners in filling capability gaps.
What the US market still needs
For all the progress, the report notes there is still distance to travel, particularly in the US where interoperability between the core functions – national payment systems, non-bank access to real-time infrastructure, built-in real-time FX conversion, and unified compliance and messaging standards – all remain works in progress.
“As the B2B cross-border market is projected to grow to $320bn by 2030, legacy issues like latency, data gaps, fraud and processing costs must be addressed along with the need for 24/7 real-time capabilities,” said Mark Majeske, SVP of Faster Payments at Alacriti and Work Group Chair.
“Solving the seven core challenges identified in this report, including ISO 20022 adoption, will finally provide businesses with the transparency and immediate liquidity required for global success.”
