On 21 October 2024, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) issued the following reports detailing work to enhance cross-border payments:
- Consolidated progress report for 2024 reporting on a broad range of actions being progressed as part of the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments. This consolidated report outlines progress made by the FSB, in coordination with the Bank for International Settlements’ Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and other relevant international organisations and standard-setting bodies over the past year on the priority actions, including efforts to strengthen engagement with cross-border payments markets participants. The report also looks at the key insights from the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) monitoring report that was published alongside this report (see below).
- Progress report on the implementation of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI). The report briefly takes stock of the evolution of the Global LEI System (GLEIS) since the 2019 and 2022 reports. It also explores the progress made to implement recommendations, looking first at the initiatives to promote broad adoption of the LEI and then focussing on the adoption of the LEI for cross-border payments. It also depicts the way forward. To continue the momentum to broaden LEI adoption, particularly in cross-border payments, the FSB recommends full and timely implementation of the 2022 FSB recommendations that have not yet been implemented. In particular, some jurisdictions have made no tangible progress towards implementing the actions set out in the 2019 and 2022 reports. The FSB also recommends that FSB member jurisdictions, in collaboration with the Regulatory Oversight Committee and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation:
- Continue exploring ways to promote LEI adoption, particularly outside the financial sector, including ways to promote awareness and adoption of the verifiable LEI to enhance trust in digital exchanges through verifiable authentication.
- Explore, where appropriate, the scope to mandate use of the LEI for certain payment message types for routing message formats migrating to ISO 20022 messages.
- Continue exploring, with national regulators and others, the role the LEI might play in assisting entities with due diligence for know your customer (KYC), as well as other use cases such as sanctions screening.
- Consider a staged approach to the introduction of the LEI requirement in payment messages by assessing which categories of entities or which thresholds of payment value could be considered for the gradual introduction of LEI requirements for payments.
The FSB adds that standard-setting bodies and international organisations should consider issuing guidance on the role that the LEI and possibly the verifiable LEI might play in assisting entities with due diligence for KYC and sanctions screening, and fraud prevention.
- Annual progress report on meeting the improved user experience targets for cross-border payments. In 2022, the FSB adopted, and the G20 endorsed, Developing the Implementation Approach for the Cross-border Payments Targets: Final Report (Implementation report), which set out the KPIs for monitoring the targets. A 2023 report on monitoring the KPIs provided a baseline of the state of cross-border payments relative to the targets. This latest report provides the 2024 levels of the KPIs on cost, speed, transparency, and access across the different segments as of Q1 2024. It explores the differences registered in the KPIs since the last KPI monitoring report and discusses the role of other concurrent events that may have affected them, such as the change in the composition of the sample of payment services providers used to calculate the KPIs or in data collection practices.