IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecb/ecbwps/20222693.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Towards the holy grail of cross-border payments

Author

Listed:
  • Bindseil, Ulrich
  • Pantelopoulos, George

Abstract

The holy grail of cross-border payments is a solution allowing cross-border payments to be immediate, cheap, universal, and settled in a secure settlement medium. The search for such a solution is as old as international commerce and the implied need to pay. This paper describes current visions how to eventually find this holy grail within the next decade, namely through (i) modernized correspondent banking; (ii) emerging cross-border FinTech solutions; (iii) Bitcoin; (iv) global stablecoins; (v) interlinked instant payment systems with FX conversion layer; (vi) interlinked CBDC with FX conversion layer. For each, settlement mechanics are explained, and an assessment is provided on its potential to be the holy grail of cross-border payments. Several solutions are suitable for improving cross-border payments significantly, and some could even be the holy grail. JEL Classification: E42, E58, F31

Suggested Citation

  • Bindseil, Ulrich & Pantelopoulos, George, 2022. "Towards the holy grail of cross-border payments," Working Paper Series 2693, European Central Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20222693
    Note: 327704
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2693~8d4e580438.en.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephanie Bolt & David Emery & Paul Harrigan, 2014. "Fast Retail Payment Systems," RBA Bulletin (Print copy discontinued), Reserve Bank of Australia, pages 43-52, December.
    2. Jim Bolton & Francesco Guidi‐Bruscoli, 2021. "‘Your flexible friend’: the bill of exchange in theory and practice in the fifteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(4), pages 873-891, November.
    3. Sean Foley & Jonathan R Karlsen & Tālis J Putniņš, 2019. "Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed through Cryptocurrencies?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1798-1853.
    4. Morten Linnemann Bech & Umar Faruqui & Takeshi Shirakami, 2020. "Payments without borders," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    5. Tara Rice & Goetz von Peter & Codruta Boar, 2020. "On the global retreat of correspondent banks," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    6. Massimiliano Renzetti & Serena Bernardini & Giuseppe Marino & Luca Mibelli & Laura Ricciardi & Giovanni Maria Sabelli, 2021. "TIPS - TARGET Instant Payment Settlement The Pan-European Infrastructure for the Settlement of Instant Payments," Mercati, infrastrutture, sistemi di pagamento (Markets, Infrastructures, Payment Systems) 1, Bank of Italy, Directorate General for Markets and Payment System.
    7. Gai, Prasanna & Kapadia, Sujit, 2010. "Contagion in financial networks," Bank of England working papers 383, Bank of England.
    8. George Pantelopoulos, 2021. "Can Central Banks circumvent the impossible trinity within their operational frameworks? Theory and evidence," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(7), pages 2041-2075, July.
    9. Bindseil, Ulrich, 2020. "Tiered CBDC and the financial system," Working Paper Series 2351, European Central Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. George Pantelopoulos, 2024. "Can external sustainability be decoupled from the NIIP?," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 89-116, February.
    2. Bindseil, Ulrich & Pantelopoulos, George, 2022. "A brief history of payment netting and settlement," IBF Paper Series 02-22, IBF – Institut für Bank- und Finanzgeschichte / Institute for Banking and Financial History, Frankfurt am Main.
    3. Manahov, Viktor & Li, Mingnan, 2024. "Stablecoins: New perspectives for travel and tourism," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    4. Luzie Thiel & Jochen Michaelis, 2023. "Digitales Zentralbankgeld: Warum wagt niemand den ersten Schritt?," Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung / Quarterly Journal of Economic Research, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 92(3), pages 5-8.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Raphael Auer & Codruta Boar & Giulio Cornelli & Jon Frost & Henry Holden & Andreas Wehrli, 2021. "CBDCs beyond borders: results from a survey of central banks," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 116.
    2. Ebers, Axel & Thomsen, Stephan L., 2021. "How do warnings affect retail demand for Bitcoin? Evidence from an international survey experiment," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(C).
    3. Erik Feyen & Jon Frost & Harish Natarajan & Tara Rice, 2021. "What Does Digital Money Mean for Emerging Market and Developing Economies?," Springer Books, in: Raghavendra Rau & Robert Wardrop & Luigi Zingales (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance, pages 217-241, Springer.
    4. Tara Rice & Goetz von Peter & Codruta Boar, 2020. "On the global retreat of correspondent banks," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    5. Carletti, Elena & Claessens, Stijn & Fatás, Antonio & Vives, Xavier (ed.), 2020. "Barcelona Report 2 - The Bank Business Model in the Post-Covid-19 World," Vox eBooks, Centre for Economic Policy Research, number p329.
    6. Morten Linnemann Bech & Jenny Hancock, 2020. "Innovations in payments," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    7. Jaemin Son & Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin & Doojin Ryu, 2022. "Consumer choices under new payment methods," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 8(1), pages 1-22, December.
    8. Castrén, Olli & Kavonius, Ilja Kristian & Rancan, Michela, 2022. "Digital currencies in financial networks," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    9. Raphael Auer & Philipp Haene & Henry Holden, 2021. "Multi-CBDC arrangements and the future of cross-border payments," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 115.
    10. Cyril Monnet & Hyun Song Shin & Jon Frost & Leonardo Gambacorta & Raphael Auer & Tara Rice, 2022. "Central Bank Digital Currencies: Motives, Economic Implications, and the Research Frontier," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 697-721, August.
    11. Agustín Carstens, 2020. "Shaping the future of payments," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    12. Huibers Fred, 2024. "Distributed Ledger Technology and the Future of Money and Banking: Banking is Necessary, Banks Are Not. Bill Gates 1994," Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, De Gruyter, vol. 14(2), pages 213-249, May.
    13. Bindseil, Ulrich & Pantelopoulos, George, 2022. "A brief history of payment netting and settlement," IBF Paper Series 02-22, IBF – Institut für Bank- und Finanzgeschichte / Institute for Banking and Financial History, Frankfurt am Main.
    14. Bargigli, Leonardo & Gallegati, Mauro, 2011. "Random digraphs with given expected degree sequences: A model for economic networks," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 78(3), pages 396-411, May.
    15. Hanna Halaburda & Guillaume Haeringer & Joshua Gans & Neil Gandal, 2022. "The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrencies," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 971-1013, September.
    16. Fariba Karimi & Matthias Raddant, 2016. "Cascades in Real Interbank Markets," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 47(1), pages 49-66, January.
    17. Goodell, John W. & Goutte, Stephane, 2021. "Co-movement of COVID-19 and Bitcoin: Evidence from wavelet coherence analysis," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 38(C).
    18. Miao He & Yanhong Guo, 2022. "Systemic Risk Contributions of Financial Institutions during the Stock Market Crash in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(9), pages 1-14, April.
    19. Kuzubaş, Tolga Umut & Saltoğlu, Burak & Sever, Can, 2016. "Systemic risk and heterogeneous leverage in banking networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 462(C), pages 358-375.
    20. Geoffrey Goodell & Hazem Danny Al-Nakib & Paolo Tasca, 2021. "A Digital Currency Architecture for Privacy and Owner-Custodianship," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-28, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    bitcoin; CBDC; correspondent banking; cross-currency payments; interlinking; stablecoins;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20222693. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Official Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/emieude.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.