Market size of global wholesale, B2B, B2C cross-border payments in 2023 and 2030

Consumer-initiated cross-border payments are to grow nearly twice as fast as its B2B counterpart between 2023 and 2030, although remaining small in comparison. This is according to a market model that aims to capture the full size of worldwide international payments, focusing especially on the business side of things. The B2B cross-border payments market, so the source estimates, is to increase by 43 percent with B2B e-commerce being one of the main drivers within this segment. The source described consumer cross-border payments as “a significantly smaller market”, but it did predict this particular market would grow by roughly 80 percent in seven years. Wholesale includes payments performed by banks, investors, and hedge funds. Banks listed several reasons on why they wanted to modernize international transactions, most notably lower costs and reaching new markets.

Cross-border payments a bigger market than remittances

International transactions covering B2B, B2C, and documentary trade comprised about 80 percent of the total cross-border payments market in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in 2022. This was for all three areas combined, with no separate figures being available. Remittances — the C2C segment — were worth around 16 billion U.S. dollars that year for the region. Note this includes international business transactions, and does not exclusively cover C2C transactions alone. Commercial-based cross-border payments also outpaced consumer transactions in Asia-Pacific — the region with the highest value of cross-border transactions in the world.

Several options to modernize international transactions

A big theme for cross-border payments in 2023 is the question of how to help speed up processes and combat international payment system fragmentation. Central banks believed that CBDC held the most promise to make international payments more efficient. The potential of such digital variants of existing FX, such as the U.S. dollar or the euro, was regarded higher than other trends — such as linking real-time payment systems together, the use of stablecoins or the upcoming ISO 20022. Central banks do acknowledge potential legal issues or technical implementations. As this is still very much in testing, the uptake of CBDC worldwide was relatively low in 2023 even in countries which had already launched such a virtual currency.