SWIFT goes retail

SWIFT, the financial messaging network created half a century ago for cross-border wire transfers, is entering the retail payments space. It plans to roll out a new framework for retail cross-border payments by the end of June with 25 banks across the world's biggest remittance markets.

Payments sent across popular corridors to Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, India, Pakistan, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the United States will come with certainty of cost, full-value delivery, end-to-end traceability, and the fastest speeds, including instant settlement where possible, SWIFT said in a statement.

More payment routes are expected to be on board by the end of 2026, scaling the benefits of fast, transparent account-to-account cross-border transactions to markets globally.

Parallel-track innovation strategy

"The financial community has made strong collective progress to improve the speed and transparency of cross-border payments, but there is room to go further," said Nasir Ahmed, head of payments scheme at SWIFT. "Everyone should be able to transact internationally at pace, safe in the knowledge that the full value will arrive with the recipient and that fees will be affordable and fixed from the start."

The initiative is one half of SWIFT's parallel-track innovation strategy, disclosed in September 2025, that aims to enable fast and frictionless cross-border transactions for consumers and small businesses as well as large corporations. The other half is a blockchain-based shared ledger that SWIFT added to its technology stack to support instant payments.

SWIFT said this will facilitate the trusted and scalable on-chain movement of regulated tokenized value across its network of 11,500 financial institutions spanning more than 200 countries and territories, the network stated.

"SWIFT has worked with its community over the past few years to significantly raise the bar on the cross-border payments experience," Thierry Chilosi, chief business officer at SWIFT, said in September. "And now, together with the industry, we are bringing those same benefits to retail customers around the world,"

The new scheme "will ensure that consumers and small businesses will experience fast and predictable international payments, whether sending money to family abroad or paying an overseas supplier," Chilosi added.

Follows G20 roadmap

The new framework advances a roadmap established by the Group of 20 countries (G20) for cross-border payments, which SWIFT said it has made a strategic priority. Recent upgrades to the network have significantly improved payment transfers, enabling fully transparent transfers that exceed G20 targets, with 75 percent of payments reaching beneficiary banks within 10 minutes, SWIFT said in a September press release.

SWIFT said in that press release that it had made significant progress in the cross-border leg and had shifted its focus to the domestic "last mile" to move the needle on speed of delivery. It added that an analysis showed that 80 percent of the time associated with delivering payments is spent in the last mile, after a payment leaves the SWIFT network, due to factors such as domestic regulations, bank and domestic market infrastructure capabilities and local market practices.

"At SWIFT we are committed to being an open network and doing all that we can to elevate the end customer experience right across the ecosystem," Chilosi explained. "That includes working with policymakers to identify and address frictions that impact flows regardless of the way value moves – while paving the way for the next generation of payment options."

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