Beyond Faster Payments: What's Still Holding Cross-Border Payments Back?

For years, the global payments industry has shared the same ambition: make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive. Progress has been made—but the hardest challenges remain. The barriers are beyond technological ones. Fragmented regulation, inconsistent standards, limited interoperability, and persistent first- and last-mile frictions continue to slow progress. Even where modern payment infrastructure exists, coordination across jurisdictions often lags behind.

Bringing together central bank governors at a pivotal moment ahead of the 2027 G20 Presidency, this session examines what will take the greatest collective effort to solve over the next phase of payments transformation. What bottlenecks matter most? Where should policymakers, central banks, and the private sector focus their attention? What forms of international cooperation are needed to translate ambition into measurable outcomes? Rather than asking what the future of cross-border payments could look like, this discussion focusses on what it will actually take to get there.