The Bank for International Settlements' Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures has published two reports to the G20 that together form the most detailed international guidance to date on connecting fast payment systems across borders and harmonising the APIs that underpin cross-border payment processing.
FPS Interlinking: Design Choices and Governance
The first report examines the design choices, risk implications, and governance frameworks for interlinking fast payment systems. It provides an analytical framework covering bilateral links (such as UPI-PayNow and the emerging PIX cross-border corridors), multilateral platforms (such as PAPSS), and hub models (such as Nexus, now incorporated as Nexus Global Payments).
The report addresses questions that operational interlinking initiatives have grappled with in practice: how to handle FX conversion in real time, how to manage settlement risk between systems operating in different currencies and time zones, and how to structure governance when linking sovereign payment infrastructures across jurisdictions.
For payment infrastructure operators considering cross-border connectivity, the report serves as both a reference architecture and a risk assessment guide. It does not prescribe a single model but maps the trade-offs between approaches - bilateral links offer speed and simplicity but do not scale; hub models scale but introduce dependency on a central operator.
API Harmonisation: Reducing Fragmentation
The second report focuses on harmonising APIs for cross-border payments, recommending that jurisdictions promote standardised API designs and implement pre-validation APIs to reduce payment failures and fragmentation.
Pre-validation APIs - which confirm payee details, check for sanctions hits, and verify account status before a payment is initiated - have been identified as a practical tool for reducing the estimated 3-6% failure rate in cross-border payments. The report draws on existing implementations, including SWIFT's pre-validation service and domestic confirmation of payee schemes, to propose harmonised approaches.
Practical Implications
These reports provide the analytical foundation for the G20 cross-border payments roadmap, which the FSB has acknowledged is unlikely to meet its 2027 targets for cost, speed, and transparency. The CPMI's work does not change those timelines, but it provides the technical building blocks that bilateral and multilateral initiatives will reference as they design and implement connections between national fast payment systems.