The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has published an interim report on monitoring progress towards the G20 goal of improving cross-border payments.
In 2020, the FSB put together a roadmap for boosting cross-border payments in response to Saudi Arabia making the improvement a priority of its G20 presidency.
Last year, the board set quantitative global targets for addressing the four challenges faced by cross-border wholesale, retail and remittance payments - cost, speed, access, transparency. But, the organisation admits that measuring progress toward these targets will not be straightforward because no comprehensive data sources exist.
Therefore, it has now published preliminary recommendations about key performance indicators (KPIs) that could be used to monitor progress, as well as ideas of potential sources of data to measure them.
For the wholesale segment, the FSB views private-sector network providers as the most promising data sources for monitoring speed and access, while the use of surveys and proxies are being evaluated for monitoring progress towards meeting the transparency target.
For the retail payments segment, the FSB proposes differentiated KPIs for the various use-cases. It notes that the enormous variety of end-users and payment service providers make collecting comprehensive data unrealistic, so is instead looking into collecting representative samples, for instance from private-sector data aggregators.
For the remittances segment, the board wants to use the "multiple high-quality databases" out there, most notably the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database and Global Findex database.
The FSB is now inviting public feedback on the plan, with submissions accepted until the end of July.