Somewhere right now, a finance team is watching a payment sit in transit, unsure exactly when it'll land or how much will arrive. That uncertainty is baked into a system moving more than $200 trillion across borders every year, a number heading toward $300 trillion by 2030, with B2B payments alone already accounting for $31.6 trillion of it.
This isn't a niche corner of the economy. It's the plumbing underneath global trade, payroll, and supply chains, and most of it still runs on infrastructure that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.
Here's what that actually costs, in three ways that compound on each other.
Start with the money itself. The global average cost of moving money across borders runs at 6.26%, and Sub-Saharan African corridors run even higher, at 8.16%, both well above the G20’s target of no more than 3% globally, and no corridor above 5%, by 2030. On a $500,000 supplier payment, that’s tens of thousands of dollars gone before the supplier even sees the money, not because anyone’s doing anything wrong, but because every correspondent bank in the chain takes its cut.
Then there's the time. 75% of payments on the SWIFT network reach the beneficiary bank withing 10 minutes; the bank-to-bank leg isn’t the bottleneck anymore.The delay shows up after that: Swift puts roughly 80% of total processing time in the “last mile”, the stretch between the money landing at the receiving bank and it actually reaching the customer’s account. That’s long enough for an exchange rate to move against you, long enough for a supplier to start asking questions, long enough for a finance team to lose track of exactly where a payment really is
Which brings us to the third cost, and it's the one that's hardest to put a number on: the visibility finance teams do get is scattered across whichever provider happened to touch the payment. SWIFT gpi tracking can tell you a lot about where a payment sits on the bank rails, but that’s one view into one leg of the journey, not the full picture of when it lands and what actually arrives.
Stitch together payments across multiple providers and corridors, and that partial visibility turns into a forecasting problem, a reconciliation headache, and a pile of exceptions nobody can explain without chasing down three different portals.
Picture a US apparel brand paying a factory in Bangladesh for a shipment of finished goods. The payment leaves a US account, routes through a correspondent bank in London, then another in Singapore, before it finally lands in Dhaka three to five days later, a little lighter than when it left. Nobody planned it that way. It's just what happens when a payment has to pass through; however, many intermediary banks happen to sit between the sender and the receiver, each one adding its own fee and its own delay. That's not a problem from 2006. It's happening on a normal Tuesday, right now, to companies doing everything correctly.
The frustrating part is that none of this is a mystery to the people dealing with it. Finance teams already know their cross-border payments cost too much and take too long, they've just accepted it as the price of doing business internationally, because until recently there wasn't a real alternative that didn't mean giving up the regulatory certainty they need to keep a board comfortable.
That's starting to change. Local payment networks, real-time systems and better correspondent banking are all helping, each in their own way. Hybrid Finance brings those gains together: one regulated operating model for fiat and stablecoins, so a finance team can use whichever rail fits the payment instead of being locked into one. A payment can move over always-on stablecoin rails as its transport layer, then land as ordinary local currency through fiat payout or SWIFT as the last mile. Nobody on either end has to touch a wallet. The supplier just gets paid.
The businesses that treat this as a solved problem already have a real head start on the ones still budgeting for five-day settlement and a 5% FX hit as if it's unavoidable. It isn't, not anymore.
That's the model behind what Sokin calls Hybrid Finance: fiat and stablecoins running through one regulated platform, instead of two systems a finance team has to stitch together themselves.