In the last week of October, two central bank publications landed within a day of each other. On October 27, the Riksbank published Sweden's response to the Financial Stability Board's call for national action plans on the G20 cross-border payment targets. On October 28, the five Nordic central banks published a joint report on what households pay to send money across the region.
Read together, they give the clearest picture yet of where Nordic cross-border payments stand against the G20 goals of cost, speed, transparency, and accessibility. The short version: the region is close on some targets, but not there yet.
The Nordic report finds that a bank transfer worth EUR 200 between two Nordic countries generally costs less than 1 percent when it is sent in euro. Send the same amount in a Nordic currency, and the combined cost for payer and payee is 4 percent or more.
That holds even when neither country uses the euro and the money is converted twice. The reason is regulatory, not technical. EU rules require euro transfers to be priced like domestic ones. No equivalent rule exists for Nordic currencies.
The G20 target for retail payments is a global average cost of no more than 1 percent by the end of 2027. In the authors' words, Nordic costs "exceed the global target of 1 per cent set by the G20."
The Riksbank's own assessment points in the same direction. Sweden meets or is close to many of the cost targets, "but not all of them." A fixed fee of at least SEK 50 on cross-border credit transfers means a SEK 1,000 payment starts at 5 percent.
On speed, the Riksbank concludes that Sweden meets the target "only partially." More than 70 percent of Swift payments to Sweden are credited within one hour, which the Riksbank calls among the best results internationally. The G20 target is 75 percent.
What holds the rest back? Among other things, the report points to "the need for manual intervention, such as controls." Every payment that stops for a manual check, a repair, or a query adds time and cost on both sides.
The most interesting line in the Riksbank's response is easy to miss:
"Transparency regarding payment status is not explicitly covered by either current or forthcoming EU legislation."
The same section notes that under shared-cost arrangements, every intermediary in the chain may take its own fee. Knowing what the sending and receiving banks charge is not enough to know what the transfer will cost in total.
So when a customer asks "where is my payment?" or "how much will actually arrive?", no rule forces a good answer. The Riksbank notes that banks plan to use tracking services and upgrade their offering here. Initiatives such as the Swift retail scheme, which requires upfront cost transparency, delivery of the full amount, and end-to-end visibility, are also on the market's radar.
Both reports point to infrastructure that will help: TIPS cross-currency, the Nordic Payments Council's NOLO Inst scheme (supported in RIX INST from March 2027), and the EU Instant Payments Regulation, which applies to payment providers in Sweden from 2027. That includes offering payers verification of the payee on euro transfers by July 9, 2027.
The Riksbank is also candid that adoption is slow. The large banks see these initiatives as interesting but "do not currently have concrete implementation plans," partly because of a collective-action problem: the benefit is small until enough others are reachable.
That is a real constraint. But it is not the whole story. Much of what customers experience as a "bad" cross-border payment is not about the rails at all. It is about what happens around them:
Neither depends on NOLO Inst going live, on TIPS reachability, or on a new regulation. Both move a bank closer to the G20 goals on speed and transparency with the infrastructure it already has.
The Nordics are often seen as being at the forefront of payments, and at home that reputation is earned. We are one of the most digital payment regions in the world. What these two reports make clear is that across borders, there are still some things that need to get done. And it is not an outside critic saying so. It is the central banks themselves, with numbers: costs above the G20 target, payments held up by manual checks, and no rule that tells a customer where their money is.
I don't read that as a reason for alarm. I read it as a to-do list. Some items on it will be solved by new rails and new rules, and they will matter. Others can be solved by banks today, with the infrastructure they already have. The banks that make cross-border payments correct before they leave and visible after they leave will be the ones their customers notice first.