Cross-border payments in travel: Risks, rewards and the road ahead

Cross-border payments are having a proverbial moment. Bolstered by several factors, the volume of these multi-currency exchanges has exploded, compelling travel retailers to not only take notice but also to invest in strategies, technologies and partnerships that allow them to mitigate the challenges and leverage the benefits. 

This exclusive report, produced by PhocusWire in association with Worldline, details the potential, costs, benefits and solutions available to travel retailers. It is essential reading for merchants seeking to tap into the burgeoning global market of customers. (Complete this form to access the report.)

Cross-border payments are, in simple terms, "financial transactions where the payer and the recipient are based in separate countries.” Taking many forms, including bank transfers, credit cards, digital wallets, super apps and (gaining momentum) central bank digital currencies, they are foundational to serving international customers. However, they “tend to be slow, generate high-transaction charges and are considerably less transparent than domestic payments.” 

There is reason for airlines, cruise operators, online travel agencies, hotels and other travel merchants to be curious about cross-border payments, especially now. Visa found that “consumers are spending more regularly cross-border than ever before, and these payments are predicted to reach $250 trillion by 2027.”

In surveying 6,500 consumers who made cross-border transactions in the previous twelve months, Visa also found:

1. 67% make monthly ecommerce purchases
2. 52% travel more than once a year
3. 45% send/receive remittances monthly
4. 16% use a default payment method
5. 66% want to stick with one payment method
6. 71% want guidance on the best option
7. Security is the biggest concern 

While consumers increasingly embrace and consider cross-border payment options, fintech companies, banks and business industry alliances are working to meet this demand. The Cross-Border Payments Work Group of the U.S. Faster Payments Council (FPC) highlighted the factors propelling cross-border payments over the last decade.

In 2017, Swift introduced its Global Payments Initiate (GPI), allowing for complete transparency, allowing financial institutions to send and receive funds “quickly and securely to anyone, anywhere in the world, with full transparency over the status of a payment at any given moment.”

In 2023, ISO 20022 became a common standard enabling “more interoperability between market infrastructures and network participants dealing with both cross-border and domestic payments.” It strengthened the previous cross-border payment methods with enriched data to control fraud, predict behaviors and build resilience. 

Distributed ledger technologies (DLT), "used to facilitate cross-border payments by providing a secure and transparent platform for the transfer of funds,” gained prominence, adding to the utility of application programming interfaces (APIs). The latter, which simplify communication between software applications, are “used to facilitate the transfer of funds cross-border allowing for the secure transfer of data between banking systems.”

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are "digital versions of a country's fiat currency issued and regulated by the country's central bank,” have become popular. "As of June 2023, the Atlantic Council was monitoring CBDC initiatives in 130 countries and currency unions,” representing “98% of the global GDP.”  CBDCs pave the way for “faster, cheaper and more secure payments than traditional methods.”

The full report is available to download after completing the registration form here.