An article from Finextra summarizes an extract from a recently released borderless payments report from Mastercard. The reference report covers multiple markets including cross-border payments across the globe, including survey data from consumers and small businesses. But this summary mostly covers data around Canadian consumer respondents and their remittance activities.
Generally speaking, more people are sending money cross-border than ever before. This made sense during the pandemic since little world travel was taking place. However, this trend is continuing in the post-pandemic timeframe. We know from other sources that the United States generates the most outbound remittance activity of any country—roughly $68 billion, according to the World Bank—but the article doesn’t mention the applicable equivalent in Canada.
Some of the summarized report findings for Canada include the relative importance of keeping personal and financial information secure (41%) and current confidence in such protection (87%), which seems fairly high to us. However, the broader survey confidence number was 88%, so not really a Canadian anomaly. This is just another indicator of the prioritization of cross-border transactions at the card networks.
Remittances are less than $700 billion globally, but the B2B space has a much broader upside. As we have pointed out in various postings of our own, cross-border payments has been a hotbed of innovation for the past few years, which includes newer initiatives that promise real-time capabilities. The World Bank (through the G20 facilitation plans now almost a decade old), has been encouraging participating countries to improve their efforts in the cross-border space, so we will continue to see faster and less expensive solutions as we move into this decade.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group.
