On 13 October 2021, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a press release announcing the publication of its first consolidated progress report covering the progress made during the first year of the G20’s Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments.
The report highlights that most of the milestones set by the Roadmap for 2021 have been completed or are close to finalisation. This includes stocktakes and analysis of both existing and emerging systems and arrangements. These stocktakes have covered diverse topics such as interlinking of payment systems and national and regional data frameworks. The next stage of work in 2022 includes the development of specific proposals for material improvements of underlying systems and arrangements, as well as the development of new systems.
A key part in the G20 Roadmap consisted of setting quantitative targets at the global level for addressing the challenges of cost, speed, transparency and access faced by cross-border payments. These targets, which are discussed further in an FSB report titled, ‘Targets for Addressing the Four Challenges of Cross-Border Payments’ play an important role in defining the ambition of the work, creating accountability.
The FSB has developed the targets based on the following principles:
- be directly related to the challenges;
- provide a clear indication of the extent of progress;
- be appropriately ambitious;
- be able to be readily communicated; and
- be meaningful to the wide range of stakeholders
In addition, the FSB sets out in the report the key design features.
By October 2022, the FSB will provide a report to the G20 and the public with further details of the implementation approach for progress monitoring, and with key performance indicators providing estimates of current performance of cross-border payments in order to provide a baseline against which future progress toward the targets can be monitored.