Nine in ten small businesses trading internationally plan to replace their primary cross-border payment provider within two years — and when they do, fintechs are expected to inherit market share that banks have held for decades. That is the central finding of Money in Motion, a report published this week by Mastercard in partnership with Bain & Company, based on a Money in Motion report survey of more than 1,000 decision-makers at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across 11 countries.

The report found that 91% of internationally active SMEs intend to switch providers, drawn toward fintechs and specialist payment firms that offer real-time settlement tracking, transparent fee structures, and integration with accounting software — capabilities that incumbent banks have historically provided poorly or not at all. The shift is not merely a matter of preference. It reflects an architectural difference in how each type of provider moves money, one that banks cannot close quickly.

Why Cross-Border Payments Are Still Slow: How Fintechs Built a Faster Road Around Them

To understand why fintechs are winning the speed and transparency race, it helps to understand what they replaced. Traditional cross-border payments travel through a chain of correspondent banking systems — intermediary institutions in different countries, each holding pre-funded accounts on behalf of the next in line. A payment from a US exporter to a Brazilian supplier might pass through two or three correspondent banks before settling, with each hop adding $15 to $75 in fees and stretching settlement time to between one and five business days. The merchant in São Paulo may not know the exact amount that will arrive, or when, because fees are deducted at each node.

Fintechs like Wise, Revolut, and Airwallex have solved this problem not by speeding up the correspondent chain but by bypassing it. Instead of routing money through a series of intermediary banks, they maintain local payment rail network accounts — or direct connections to domestic payment networks — in dozens of countries simultaneously. When a US company sends money to a Brazilian supplier, Wise does not wire funds internationally in the traditional sense: it debits the sender’s US account and credits the recipient from its own pre-funded Brazilian account, settling via PIX settlement network, Brazil’s domestic instant payment network, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The cross-border leg of the transaction is handled on the back end through periodic net settlement between Wise’s local accounts — not through each individual payment.

Wise was the first non-bank to UK Faster Payments access directly into the UK’s Faster Payments Service (FPS), cutting roughly 90% of partner bank fees and reducing transfer times for eligible payments to under 20 seconds. That is not an incremental improvement on the correspondent model. It is a different architecture, made possible by years of regulatory licensing work and capital investment in building local bank accounts in more than 80 countries.

For banks, replicating this model is not simply a matter of upgrading software. Their most profitable corporate clients generate fee income through correspondent banking relationships. Building a competing local-rail infrastructure would require investing in a system that undercuts their existing revenue while maintaining the old one — an economic and organizational disincentive that helps explain why the speed gap has persisted for so long.

Mastercard occupies a distinct position in this landscape. Mastercard Move global network, its money movement product portfolio, does not replace the correspondent chain so much as provide a hub through which banks and fintechs alike can access local payment rails in more than 200 countries and territories, covering more than 150 currencies and reaching approximately 95% of the world’s banked population. It is infrastructure on which both sides of the competition build. When McLaren Racing payment partnership, the Formula 1 team sponsored by Mastercard, uses Airwallex for its global supplier payments, it is accessing Mastercard Move’s payout network through Airwallex’s API layer.

In 2025, a national security advocacy group wrote to Congress requesting an investigation into Airwallex over its China-based operations and investors, which include Tencent and HongShan. Airwallex China security concerns have since expanded: in December 2025, Senator Tom Cotton wrote to the US Attorney General requesting an investigation, and in June 2026 he separately asked the Treasury Secretary to initiate a CFIUS review. Airwallex has stated that no US customer data is accessible to China-based staff and that its data is stored in US, Netherlands, and Singapore data centers. The company confirmed in May 2026 it was relocating some staff out of China following public attention to the issue. The matter remains unresolved. SME operators evaluating Airwallex as a provider should review its current data-residency documentation.

A $47.8 Trillion Market in Motion

The competitive stakes are large. The global B2B cross-border payments market reached $31.7 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach $47.8 trillion by 2032, a 51% increase. The SME market growth projections segment of that market — estimated by FXC Intelligence at $13.8 trillion in 2024 — is projected to grow by 54% to $21.2 trillion by 2032.

Against that backdrop, the provider-switching intent documented in the survey represents a reallocation of wallet share with real revenue consequences. Even marginal movements matter: a separate Mastercard analysis of Latin America and the Caribbean estimated that a 1% reallocation of LAC cross-border revenue analysis cross-border SME payment flows in that region alone could represent approximately $230 million in annual revenue shifting between banks and competitors.

The current provider split 2025 favors banks, but just barely. As of 2025, 42% of SMEs name a bank as their primary cross-border payment provider, while 30% use a fintech. The report projects that by 2028, those numbers will invert: 48% of SMEs are expected to rely on a fintech as their primary provider, while banks’ share falls to 28%.

What Banks Stand to Lose Beyond the Transaction

The projections from Money in Motion become more consequential in light of a finding about how SMEs actually use their payment providers. More than nine in ten (92%) of the SMEs surveyed already use multiple providers simultaneously — using different platforms for different corridors or transaction types. The battle is not about locking in exclusive customers. It is about being named the primary relationship — the provider that gets the largest share of transactions and the first call when a new use case emerges.

That primary relationship is worth more than the payment itself. Fintechs that win cross-border payment volume gain transaction data, cash-flow visibility, and a trusted integration touchpoint — from which loans, FX hedging tools, treasury management, and other financial services can be offered. Banks that cede the payment relationship risk losing the entry point to the broader SME banking relationship value.

“Banks and fintechs cannot afford to treat cross-border payments as a back-office service,” said Pratik Khowala, Mastercard’s global head of transfer solutions. “For SMEs, it is becoming a test of whether a provider understands their business. Those that keep pace can build deeper relationships. Those that do not risk losing not just payment volumes, but the wider SME relationship.”

The value-added services data in the report underscores this point. Payment tracking — knowing where a specific payment is in real time, and when it will settle — was identified as a desired service by 43% of SMEs surveyed. Fraud detection capability followed at 42%. These are not peripheral preferences. For an SME paying a supplier in advance for goods that cannot ship until funds are confirmed received, payment tracking is a supply chain tool, not a convenience feature.

What SMEs Actually Want: Trust First, Cost Second

The survey’s findings on provider-selection priorities challenge a commonly held assumption about why SMEs switch: that price is the primary driver. Trust leads selection criteria — cited by 35% of respondents as the top consideration when selecting a cross-border payment provider, with speed close behind at 34%. Cost and transparency each ranked at 28%.

Among SMEs that had already switched providers recently, the driving factor was even clearer: 67% switched for speed — saying faster transactions and more reliable settlements were the primary reason they moved. Price was not the headline.

“Trust remains the anchor,” said Joe Lischwe, a Bain financial services partner, “but the fundamentals of the payment experience — reliability, transparency and efficiency — increasingly need to simply work. The winners will be those that combine that trusted foundation with greater visibility, control and flexibility as their customers’ needs evolve.”

“SMEs want to move money across borders with the same speed and confidence as domestic transactions, but many banks remain constrained by legacy systems,” said Anouska Ladds, Mastercard’s Executive Vice President for Commercial and New Payment Flows in Asia Pacific.

Where Does the Market Stand in 2026: A Global Snapshot

The Money in Motion report found meaningful variation across markets that matters for both providers and SME operators making provider decisions.

In Indonesia and India, SMEs showed the highest appetite for multi-provider diversification rates: 34% and 29% respectively reported using at least four providers, compared to a global survey average of 19%. For any provider seeking loyalty in those markets, the baseline expectation is that competitors are already at the table.

In the United Kingdom, transparency proved the strongest loyalty lever, and in the United States, real-time tracking drove loyalty intent for 44% of US respondents — compared to 38% of UK SMEs who cited upfront pricing as their top loyalty driver and a 32% global average for real-time status updates.

Brazil stood out as the market most actively exploring new capabilities: 60% of Brazilian SMEs said they were evaluating additional payment tools beyond baseline transactions, compared to a global average of 48%. Brazil cross-border payment adoption through PIX, which processes real-time payments at near-zero cost and is deeply embedded in the country’s business infrastructure, has raised baseline expectations for what a payment experience should feel like — and created an environment in which providers that cannot match PIX’s immediacy are already behind.

The G20 Countdown: Regulatory Momentum Aligned with Market Pressure

The market forces documented in the Mastercard-Bain report are now running in parallel with regulatory pressure from the G20 2027 payment targets, which sets targets for the global industry — cost below 1% of transaction value, 75% of payments settling within one hour, and full fee transparency — to be achieved by the end of 2027. At a Financial Stability Board summit in London in March 2026, the FSB accelerated implementation planning and committed to regional and jurisdictional rollout plans.

For banks evaluating how much urgency to assign to the SME payment experience gap, the answer is: 15 months. Both the regulatory deadline and the 91% switching-intent window point to the same horizon. Providers that close the experience gap by 2027 will be meeting regulatory targets and retaining customers simultaneously. Those that do not will face both an enforcement environment requiring faster, cheaper, more transparent payments and a customer base that has already moved to providers who deliver them.

On September 22, 2026 — one day before the Mastercard-Bain report was published — SoFi Mastercard stablecoin partnership became the first national bank to go live with stablecoin settlement across Mastercard’s network, a sign that the infrastructure for next-generation cross-border payment settlement is advancing along multiple tracks simultaneously.

What SME Operators Should Ask Their Payment Provider Today

The Money in Motion findings translate into a practical checklist for any SME that moves money across borders regularly:

Does your provider offer real-time payment tracking from initiation to recipient credit — and does that tracking work for every corridor you use, not just major ones? Does it disclose the full cost of a transfer upfront, including FX margin and all fees, before you execute? Can it settle in the destination country’s local currency via a domestic rail (PIX, Faster Payments, ACH, UPI) rather than through a correspondent chain? And when something goes wrong — a payment delayed, a currency rate dispute — does it have a support structure that can resolve the issue in hours, not business days?

The survey’s data suggests that the providers who can say yes to all four questions are increasingly fintechs, not banks. The providers who cannot answer yes are the ones losing the 91%.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are fintechs faster at cross-border payments than banks?

Traditional banks process most international payments through a chain of “correspondent banks” — intermediary financial institutions in different countries, each holding pre-funded accounts and each adding fees and settlement delay. Fintechs like Wise, Revolut, and Airwallex bypass this chain by maintaining their own local bank accounts or direct connections to domestic payment networks (such as PIX in Brazil, Faster Payments in the UK, and ACH in the US) in dozens of countries. When money appears to “cross borders” through a fintech, what actually happens is that the fintech debits a local account in the sending country and credits a local account in the receiving country — settling through domestic rails that take seconds or minutes, not days. The cross-border net settlement happens periodically on the fintech’s backend, not inside every individual transaction.

What does the 91% switching-intent figure actually mean for my business?

It means the vast majority of internationally active SMEs are actively evaluating whether their current cross-border payment provider is still the right choice — and that most are likely to make a change within two years. If you are not reviewing your provider relationship, the Money in Motion data suggests your competitors probably are. The survey found that trust and speed matter more than cost as selection criteria, so the review criteria should focus on: whether your provider gives you real-time tracking, whether it discloses the full cost upfront including FX margins, and whether it settles in your supplier’s local currency via a fast domestic network.

How do I evaluate whether a fintech cross-border payment provider is safe for my business data?

As fintechs have grown in prominence, questions about their data security and regulatory compliance have grown too. Key questions to ask any provider: Where is your data stored, and who has access to it? What financial licenses does the provider hold in each jurisdiction where it operates? Has it been subject to any security audits or regulatory enforcement actions? For providers with operations in countries subject to data-sharing obligations under national security law (including China and Russia), ask specifically whether any staff in those jurisdictions can access your transaction data or personal information. Providers operating under US law are also required to comply with federal data-security standards, and most major fintechs disclose their data-residency practices in their terms of service.

Is the G20 roadmap going to change what my bank offers for cross-border payments?

Potentially yes — and the timeline is short. The G20’s cross-border payments roadmap, coordinated by the Financial Stability Board, requires that by the end of 2027, payment service providers offer full cost and speed transparency, and that 75% of cross-border payments settle within one hour. For markets that are already achieving this (the UK through Faster Payments, Brazil through PIX, India through UPI), the targets will reinforce existing infrastructure. For markets still dependent on correspondent chains for most cross-border flows, the deadline creates regulatory pressure for banks to either upgrade their capabilities or partner with infrastructure providers like Mastercard Move that already connect to local rails. Whether that translates into a meaningfully better experience for SMEs before 2028 depends on how aggressively banks invest in the transition.