Freight and Funds
Line 04 · cross-border paymentbatch EU-4471 · loaded
Freight and Funds · Rotterdam

A payment moves like a part on a line.

Same stations, same handovers, same place where it stops. Scroll to run one batch.

  1. Documents
  2. Instruction
  3. Checks
  4. Credit
Station log
09:02Batch accepted. 3 documents matched: invoice, packing list, bill of lading.Documents required before a bank will pay
09:04Terms fixed under Incoterms. Risk passes to the buyer at the loading dock.One of 11 published rules
09:11Instruction sent. 90% of cross-border payments reach the receiving bank inside an hour.Swift, October 2024
09:12Routed through a correspondent. Inside the euro area, instant transfers now carry about a third of the volume.European Payments Council, October 2025
10:08Arrived at the receiving bank, not in the account. Only 43% get credited to the customer within that hour.Swift, October 2024
10:40Held for checks: sanctions screening, fraud rules, clearing cut-off. Nobody you have a contract with owns this leg.Financial Stability Board, 2024 report
14:26Credited short. 6.36% of the amount sent is the average corridor cost, taken along the way.World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025
14:27Same transfer, digital channel: 4.59%. On a shipment invoice that gap is a working week of margin.World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025
scroll to run the batch
The route

Eight stages between an order and money in the account.

Every stage has an owner, a document and a cost. Below is the whole chain in one view: the same one the scene above walks through.

Costs shown are published averages, linked in each stage. Where a stage carries no price, what it costs is time.

Speed

The payment is fast until it stops being your bank's problem.

Swift publishes how quickly payments cross its network. The headline number is genuinely good. The number underneath it is the one that decides whether your supplier ships on Monday.

Source: Swift, published 17 October 2024, and the Financial Stability Board annual report on the G20 targets. Read 3 September 2026.

Cost

What a corridor charges, and what the channel changes.

The World Bank prices 367 corridors every quarter. Pick how the money travels and watch the same transfer change price.

6.36%global average, all channels
Bar shows cost against the worst channel measured Global average has stayed under 7% since 2019

Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025 issue published September 2025. The index prices transfers equivalent to 200 US dollars across 367 corridors. Read 3 September 2026.

Access

Two and a half trillion dollars of trade that nobody financed.

The gap is not a shortage of money. It is a shortage of applications a bank will approve, and it falls hardest on the smallest exporters. Four in ten applications from small and medium firms are refused, which is now almost exactly the rate for large corporates, and that convergence is the good news buried in the survey.

Source: Asian Development Bank, Global Trade Finance Gap Survey 2025. Read 3 September 2026.

Plain words

Nine terms that move real money.

Each one appears in a document you have already signed or are about to. Open a term to see what it does to you.

Schedule

What publishes next.