In our previous article we looked at Swift turning itself from a network into a scheme - a rulebook of commitments on price, speed, and transparency, layered on top of the connectivity it already provides. It’s tempting to slot the next big cross-border initiative into the same story and call it “Swift vs. the challenger.” That would miss what’s actually happening.
Nexus started as a Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub project: could you connect countries’ domestic instant payment systems - the rails behind Sweden’s RIX-INST, India’s UPI, Singapore’s PayNow - so that a cross-border payment moves the way a domestic one already does, in seconds rather than days? In March 2025, the central banks of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand answered that question by incorporating Nexus Global Payments, a not-for-profit scheme organisation based in Singapore, with Indonesia joining shortly after as a sixth participant.
Mechanically, Nexus doesn’t touch banks directly. It sits behind the scenes, between instant payment systems. An IPS operator connects to Nexus once via a common set of APIs and ISO 20022 messages and gains reachability to every other connected country, instead of negotiating a bilateral link for each corridor. The BIS’s own math makes the case: connecting 70 domestic systems bilaterally would take 2,415 separate links; through Nexus, it takes 70.
Here’s where it gets interesting alongside Swift. Swift is taking an existing network - the correspondent banking rails that move the world’s higher-value and institutional flows - and writing a rulebook on top of it. Nexus is the rulebook first: it was designed from day one as a multilateral scheme, with its own governance, oversight, and commercial model, purpose-built to standardize how instant payment systems talk to each other.
They’re also not built for the same job. Nexus, at launch, handles retail push payments person-to-person, business-to-business, and the payments in between capped at whatever limit each domestic instant payment system already sets. It doesn’t yet touch pull payments, point-of-sale, or the higher-value flows that run through correspondent banking. That’s Swift’s territory, and it isn’t going anywhere.
What both are converging on, though, is the same G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments: costs under 1% on average, three-quarters of payments settled within an hour, and the sender told upfront what a payment will cost and when it will arrive. Swift is meeting that bar by formalizing commitments across its network. Nexus is meeting it by formalizing how domestic rails connect to each other. Different starting points, same destination which is exactly why “Nexus vs. Swift” is the wrong frame.
For a bank, this isn’t an either/or decision. A bank active in Southeast Asia or India may find Nexus relevant sooner than Swift’s Scheme; a bank moving institutional volumes across correspondent corridors will meet the Scheme first. Many banks will eventually need to meet both. Plus whatever comes after them, because interlinking initiatives like this are exactly where the G20 Roadmap has said cross-border payments are headed.
We think the mistake would be building a compliance and experience layer that’s wired to one scheme’s rulebook. The commitments both are converging on - validate the payee before money moves, show price and timing up front, confirm and track delivery after - live at the edges of the payment, not inside whichever rail carries it. That’s precisely the layer we build: modular, added on top of what a bank already runs, and not rebuilt every time a new scheme enters the picture.
The real test for a bank isn’t “are we connected to Nexus?” or “are we ready for Swift’s Scheme?” It’s whether a customer gets the same answer: clear price, clear timing, clear confirmation - no matter which rail their payment happens to take. That consistency is the harder problem, and it’s the one worth solving now, while the map of schemes is still being drawn rather than finished.
Next in this series: the first of four G20 goals reshaping cross-border payments - speed, and why arriving faster doesn’t automatically mean arriving better.