Press Releases
Rails Are No Excuse: How a Business Can Win Back Control of Its Cross-Border Costs
Every conversation about cross-border payments lands on the same verdict: the pipes are old, the correspondent network is thinning, and only a long wave of reform will make cross-border payments cheap and fast. The infrastructure problem is real, but a business cannot change it. What it can move is narrower and more useful: the account where it holds its money, and whether the provider's terms fit the way it trades.
In one line: where your bank decides what cross-border costs you. Keep a balance in every currency you invoice in, each under an IBAN in your company's name, and paying a supplier in that currency settles like a domestic transfer. No intermediary takes a cut, you pay the FX spread once rather than on every payment, and the funds land in hours, not days. None of this waits on a standards body; it is a change a treasury team can make now.
The Rails Will Not Be Fixed in Time
The G20 drew a hard line for 2027: no corridor costing more than 3% of the amount sent, and three-quarters of payments credited within an hour. Six years in, the scorekeepers now say the line will be missed.
The Financial Stability Board's 2025 progress report calls it unlikely that improvement will arrive in line with the 2027 timetable, and admits the effort has not yet reached end-users. The BIS reached the same conclusion across 82 jurisdictions: the targets will not be fully met.
Businesses feel that gap directly: nearly one-third of cross-border payments still cost more than 3%, and only 40% of B2B transfers settle within a single working day. The network they lean on is thinning, too: the global supply of correspondent banking relationships has fallen 20% since the mid-2000s, and some corridors now have no intermediary at all.
Where the Cost Actually Hides in Your Flows
The friction is easy to find, looking for it in your own numbers instead of the headlines. First, count the hops: every intermediary bank between you and your counterparty takes a fee and a slice of the exchange rate, so ask how many sit in your busiest corridors. Second, count the conversions: convert on every transaction and you pay the spread every time, where holding the currency means paying it once.
Third, read your IBAN: a pooled or foreign IBAN gets payments queried, delayed or refused, while one in your own name does not. Finally, find the trapped cash: money in transit for days is working capital you cannot deploy, and it rarely shows on a spend line even though it is a real cost.
These are not four problems to solve separately, each traces back to the same decision: where the money sits, and whose name is on the account that holds it.
Turning a Cross-Border Payment Into a Local One
In practice, the fix comes down to three things a company keeps in its own name rather than leaving to a correspondent bank. COLIBRIX ONE gives a business all three from one account, so the money, and every decision about it, stays under its control:
- A multi-currency account, so money sits in the currencies you actually trade in and the spread is paid once on the way in, not on every transaction after.
- An IBAN in your own company name in each zone, so you collect and pay as a local, the correspondent hop drops out, and payments stop drawing the queries a pooled IBAN invites.
- SEPA and Swift reach across markets, so you trade wherever you need to without a separate banking relationship in every country.
"Businesses keep being told to wait for better rails, but the money is leaking today, and the one variable they fully control is where they hold it," says Iveta Krūmiņa, Chief Commercial Officer at COLIBRIX ONE. "The moment a company holds its currencies where it trades and pays under its own IBAN, the cross-border cost stops being a corridor problem and becomes a local payment, and that is something a finance team can act on this quarter, not this decade."
Together, they turn a cross-border payment into a set of local ones and take the correspondent chain out of the path, which is exactly where the 3%-plus cost and the multi-day delay live. This does not replace the rails; it stops a business paying for their worst part while the roadmap catches up.
