As pricing between providers converges, the question of whether a payment actually arrives, and how quickly, is becoming the one that decides who wins the business.

Moshe Kimhi is the CEO and founder of Neema, a global cross-border payments platform powering fintechs, digital wallets and financial institutions worldwide. In this contributed piece, he argues that international payments behave less like a wallet and more like a journey by car, and that providers need dynamic, real-time routing to keep transactions from failing. The views expressed are his own.

A year or two ago, the cross-border payments conversation was largely about price. Providers competed on rate sheets and commercial terms, and clients picked whomever offered the best deal. That competition did its job, as the rate gap between providers has narrowed. But with the price factor becoming less central, a more fundamental consideration has emerged, one that price competition was never going to solve: will the money actually get there? And will it get there fast enough to matter?

The switch in focus is an outgrowth of a trend I’ve been noticing in the fintech world, one that goes beyond my own experiences with the money transfer companies using our routing technology to move funds between countries: efforts to improve cross-border payments have not yet translated into meaningfully better outcomes for the people actually sending and receiving money.

” The Bank for International Settlements was even more specific about what’s going wrong, finding that just 35 per cent of global cross-border retail payments and 55 per cent of wholesale and remittance payments are credited within one hour of initiation, well short of the G20 target of 75 per cent.

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