We partnered with McKinsey and Company to benchmark the payments experience offered to customers around the world. Here’s what we found.
In recent years, cross-border payments have taken centre stage for businesses and consumers. Not only in terms of their volumes, which McKinsey estimates will reach $183 trillion by 2027, but also the very nature of how they travel from country to country.
Speed, transparency, predictability, and cost effectiveness — that’s what customers expect when sending money abroad. These customers have imported their experiences from other industries and applied them directly to cross-border payments.
Keeping pace with evolving expectations
To keep pace with these expectations, the G20 has set targets to evolve the payments landscape by 2027, and payment providers are innovating and collaborating to meet them. So far, we’ve made great progress as an industry. But what more can providers do to deliver this enhanced experience?
If we want to continue making significant progress, we must first understand what customers truly value in a cross-border payments experience. With this goal in mind, we partnered with McKinsey and Company to benchmark the current landscape — assessing how money is sent across borders today — and to identify where there’s room to raise the bar for the industry as a whole going forward.
The path to enhanced cross-border payment experiences
This report offers a strategic roadmap to improving cross-border payment experiences. Download it today to learn how your institution can improve.
Our key findings
We benchmarked the payments experience offered by over 90 financial institutions, spanning multiple regions. Based on this research, we identified three core areas where payment providers can make the most impact:
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Make payments simple, every time
Best-in-class providers can simplify the user journey by pre-populating fields, validating account details upfront and guiding customers with clear instructions. These steps reduce friction and improve speed. Right now, the industry lacks uniform experiences and would benefit from a best practice standard.
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Be upfront and transparent
Customers want to know the full cost of sending a payment before they press send. And once they do, they want full payment traceability and delivery notifications for peace of mind. The most trusted experiences display fee breakdowns and FX rates early, before providing real-time status updates and beneficiary alerts. We believe that a customer-centric approach will significantly improve trust and satisfaction.
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Capitalise on existing payment solutions
Many improvements can be made by leveraging existing rails and infrastructure. And the majority of payment providers are already adopting steady improvements, rather than building new systems, to improve their customers' experience.
How does your institution compare?
Want to learn how your institution compares to our benchmarks? If so, reach out to your account manager to book a dedicated one-to-one session. They’ll help you understand what you’re already doing well, and where there’s room to improve. By doing so, we can raise the standard of cross-border payments across the entire industry.
