For all the speed and convenience that modern fintech has brought to international payments, finance departments at businesses operating across multiple countries still struggle with a deceptively simple question: where is the money right now? Sending a payment can take seconds on a smartphone app, but the underlying networks remain those of an older banking era, meaning the funds often travel through chains of correspondent banks, each with its own settlement timeline. The result is that finance teams spend more hours tracking payments than they do initiating them.
Tracking payments: a persistent problem
A business selling into even three different countries can end up working with a dozen banks, several currencies and wildly different settlement schedules. One cross-border payment clears the same day; another vanishes into processing for a week because one or more intermediary banks sit in the middle. Finance staff then reconcile those payments by hand — matching invoices, exchange rates and settlement confirmations — once the money finally arrives.
The scale of these flows is enormous. Global cross-border bank credit reached $34.7 trillion during the first quarter of 2025, while wider international banking claims remained above $45 trillion, according to industry data. Systems originally designed for slower international trade volumes are now processing far larger transaction loads every day.
For UK businesses, the post-Brexit landscape has added new friction. Euro payments from the UK to the European Union are now routinely treated as international transfers, meaning higher transaction costs and longer processing times. Some EU banks no longer classify UK-EU euro payments as domestic. The Financial Conduct Authority has expressed concern about pricing transparency, noting that transaction fees, intermediary bank costs and the variability of those fees are not always clearly disclosed before a transfer is initiated.
The cost adds up quickly. Banks and intermediaries impose multiple fees and foreign-exchange markups, often pushing total costs above 3% for many corridors, and smaller transfers can incur fees of around 6%. Traditional banks may charge 1.5–3% above interbank rates in hidden FX markups alongside per-transaction fees — Barclays, for example, charges £15 for international SWIFT payments. SWIFT payments themselves can take two to five business days to process, clear and settle due to the chain of correspondent banks. A delayed transfer can affect supplier payments, payroll timing and reporting accuracy, particularly as businesses process larger payment volumes across several regions at once.
Finance teams increasingly want faster confirmation around settlement timing and foreign-exchange exposure, because those details directly affect forecasting and operational planning. Yet many businesses still use separate providers for FX conversion, settlement handling and treasury reporting, leaving finance departments to pull information from several dashboards just to confirm whether a payment arrived correctly.
ISO 20022: rebuilding payment data standards
The root of many tracking problems lies in the way payment messages are formatted. Banks spent decades using older messaging standards built around limited data fields, which meant that transaction information often arrived incomplete or structured differently from one institution to the next. ISO 20022 is a globally developed methodology designed to change that. It creates consistent, structured message formats for payments, allowing richer and more detailed reference information to travel with each transfer.
SWIFT networks already process more than 1.6 million ISO 20022 payment instructions daily, a sign of how quickly financial institutions are rebuilding the plumbing underneath international payments. When a finance department needs to trace a delayed payment across several banking systems, structured transaction data makes those payments easier to track because banks receive consistent information attached to each transfer. The richer data also enables more sophisticated financial crime detection models, reducing manual intervention and delays.
In the UK, adoption is well advanced. The Bank of England’s CHAPS and Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system migrated to ISO 20022 in June 2023. Pay.UK’s New Payments Architecture will also use the standard for domestic retail payments. SWIFT itself will require financial institutions to receive payments using ISO 20022, with full enablement scheduled by 2025. The standard has been adopted in more than 70 countries, aiming to harmonise payment systems worldwide. Benefits include improved processing accuracy, more efficient sanctions checking, reduced risk and maintenance costs from standardisation, and the ability to derive better insight into customer behaviour and market trends from the richer data.
Consolidated systems as the solution
Despite the promise of ISO 20022, many businesses still operate fragmented systems. A single failed payment reference can trigger long email chains between banks, finance teams and suppliers as accounting departments try to determine where the transaction stalled. With multiple disconnected systems sitting inside the same workflow, global payments become far harder to manage at scale. Research shows that 47% of UK chief financial officers cite integration challenges as the biggest barrier to automation, and fragmented systems hinder real-time cash visibility, impacting forecasting and cost control.
Investors, meanwhile, are shifting focus. After years of funding payment apps built around customer experience, more capital is now flowing into the infrastructure that supports those interfaces. Financial technology categories that reduce manual workload inside financial organisations are attracting increasing attention, with investors seeking systems that eliminate repetitive manual tasks rather than simply polishing front-end design.
Fintech infrastructure providers are responding by consolidating functions into connected digital platforms. BONCA — a platform focused on cross-border payments, dedicated business IBANs and international settlement infrastructure — operates around reducing fragmentation by combining payment routing, IBAN infrastructure and settlement inside a single operational environment. FX handling and treasury oversight increasingly sit inside unified systems rather than several disconnected interfaces. Finance teams processing global payments want fewer manual checks, fewer reporting gaps and faster visibility into where money moved once transactions begin scaling globally. The businesses that succeed will be those that recognise that tracking money is not a technology problem — it is a data and infrastructure problem, and one that requires systems designed for the volume and complexity of modern international trade.
