Consumers and small businesses receiving payments in a range of countries, including five of the world’s largest remittance markets, will be among the first to benefit as Swift and banks globally roll out a pioneering new framework to bring next generation speed and new levels of affordability and predictability to cross-border retail payments.

Payments sent across popular corridors to Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Germany, India, Pakistan, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the US will come with certainty of cost, full-value delivery, end-to-end traceability, and the fastest speeds, including instant settlement where possible, as an initial group of more than 25 banks go live by the end of June. More payment routes are expected to be active by the end of the year, scaling the benefits of fast, transparent account-to-account cross-border transactions to markets globally.

Of the initial launch markets, Bangladesh, China, Germany, Pakistan and India are all in the top 10 countries for remittances received.

Swift announced in September 2025 that it would develop the new network rules with a voluntary coalition of earlier adopter banks to further elevate the cross-border payments experience towards the G20’s goals for consumer payments. While 75% of payments over Swift reach destination banks within 10 minutes or less  – ahead of the G20 target – more needs to be done in the front-end and final domestic leg to improve the end-to-end experience. Swift’s framework addresses those areas, providing retail customers with the ease, peace of mind and predictability they expect when sending money internationally.

Nasir Ahmed, Head of Payments Scheme at Swift, said: “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. Everyone should be able to transact internationally at pace, safe in the knowledge that the full value will arrive with the recipient and that the fees will be affordable and fixed from the start. That is what our community is enabling with this initiative. We’re committed to giving everyone the same first-class cross-border payments experience across all markets and all regulated forms of value – whenever, wherever and with full transparency – and we’re pleased to see the global banking community making this possible for their end customers.”

The payments scheme is one half of Swift’s parallel track innovation strategy to enable fast and frictionless cross-border transactions, regardless of the type of value being exchanged. Swift is also adding a blockchain-based shared ledger to its infrastructure stack, with an initial focus of enabling 24/7 real time cross-border payments. This will facilitate the trusted and scalable on-chain movement of regulated tokenised value across Swift’s secure, resilient network of 11,500 banks and financial institutions that spans more than 200 countries and territories.

More than 50 banks from around the world are supporting the framework.