Spotlight on Speed 2025

In 2024, we published a review of the top 40 countries on our network demonstrating how the speed of payments varied dramatically between receiving countries. This data showed that speed was largely determined by local infrastructure and practices affecting the time beneficiary institutions take to credit the end account. 

Data from our network shows that, on average, the inflight time is less than 20% of the overall cross-border journey, with a full 80% spent in the last mile, after a payment leaves the Swift network. With this in mind, it’s clear that addressing friction at the last mile could have a significant impact on overall payment speeds.

We delved deeper into this area in 2025 through discussions with authorities and financial institutions, publishing the results in our latest paper: Spotlight on Speed 2025. 

Why the last mile is the longest

Our data identified the following four root causes as the main contributors to delays during the last mile of a payment’s journey, in order of importance:

1. Regulatory reporting requirements, particularly purpose-of payment reporting for balance of payment statistics.
2. Currency, FX, and other risk controls set by individual countries.
3. Lack of real-time 24/7 infrastructure, both nationally and within financial institutions.
4. Manual processes, such as local payment requirements, financial crime compliance checks or additional internal process checks.

Towards a brighter financial future
If countries want to speed up international payments and reap the economic benefits, they will need to commit to addressing these root causes. Introducing new technologies or infrastructure is not a silver bullet – whether value travels over new or existing rails, the challenges will remain the same. As a result, developing solutions to these issues will require a combination of both global and local initiatives.

Download our paper, Spotlight on Speed 2025, to explore what we learned from our analysis and how the results can speed up cross-border transactions. Written with both policymakers and financial institutions in mind, the proposed solutions have the potential to speed up cross-border payments, boost efficiency and drive progress across the entire ecosystem.