The Case for Extending Real-Time Payments Across Borders

Demand for faster, always-on payments has driven major investments in domestic real-time infrastructures, including The Clearing House’s (TCH) Real Time Payments® (RTP®) network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service in the U.S.

Schemes like these are transforming local payments, enabling funds to move within seconds, 24/7/365, and helping businesses improve liquidity management, optimize working capital and deliver a more seamless customer experience.

The next opportunity lies in extending these benefits across borders. With faster cross-border payments, supplier payments can be streamlined, late-payment risks mitigated and greater certainty provided over settlement. Additional use cases include remittances, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, transfers of university fees and time-sensitive payments.

One-Leg Out (OLO) schemes offer a practical way to bring these real-time capabilities to the cross-border payment space. By connecting existing correspondent banking arrangements with domestic real-time payment systems, OLO enables real-time processing of the sending or receiving leg of an international payment. This improves payment speed and predictability without requiring entirely new global payment networks.

For banks operating at the center of cross-border payment flows, the appeal of OLO lies in its pragmatism. Rather than waiting for new global infrastructure, OLO leverages the domestic real-time rails and correspondent relationships that already exist — accelerating the legs of a payment that today cause the most friction.

What Is an OLO Cross-Border Payment?

Cross-border payments typically pass through several stages before reaching beneficiaries. While correspondent banking networks play a key role in moving funds between countries, the overall payment experience can still be shaped  by variations in operating hours, compliance processes and domestic payment infrastructures. Consequently, settlement times may vary, with some cross-border payments reaching recipients within seconds while others take hours or even days.

The growth of domestic instant payment systems creates an opportunity to expedite this process without replacing existing cross-border networks. The OLO model connects an international payment arrangement to an existing domestic instant payment system, enabling real-time processing and ensuring that funds enter or leave a domestic market more quickly.

The benefits are even greater when real-time arrangements are available on both ends of a transaction. In this scenario, a payment leaves the originating market through one domestic instant payment system and is delivered via another in the destination market — significantly reducing delays at both ends of the cross-border journey.

In moving the industry closer to an end-to-end near-real-time experience, OLO aligns with the G20’s Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments which aims to make international payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible by the end of 2027. By increasing the speed of one or both legs of the cross-border journey, OLO offers a practical means by which the industry can meet these objectives.

However, OLO schemes differ from bilateral or multilateral linkages, which directly connect two or more domestic instant payment systems via shared technical, operational and governance arrangements. While such linkages — also an ambition outlined in the G20’s Roadmap — provide broad reach across participating networks, they often require significantly greater coordination, investment and regulatory alignment between markets.

As a practical way to extend the benefits of domestic instant payments across borders with existing infrastructure, the OLO model is starting to gain traction globally. 

OLO in Europe, Australia and the Americas

While at different stages of development and adoption, OLO schemes are already being leveraged across several markets.

One of the clearest examples can be found in Europe. Launched in November 2023, the European Payments Council’s (EPC) OLO Instant Credit Transfer scheme, or OCT Inst, enables the euro leg of an international payment to be processed through the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) instant payment infrastructure.

In Australia, a similar model is already in operation, with the Australian-dollar leg processed through the New Payments Platform’s (NPP) International Payments Service (IPS). A partnership between BNY and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for example, enables customers to send international payments to Australian beneficiaries on a 24/7/365 basis.

A comparable model, covering both OLO and international on-behalf-of payments, is being developed for the U.S. market by TCH. The scheme is designed to connect cross-border payment flows with the RTP® network, enabling the U.S.-dollar leg of eligible international payments to be processed in real time. Initially, this is expected to support select payment types where faster delivery can provide concrete benefits, such as supplier payments, tuition payments, marketplace payouts and certain consumer payment flows.¹

TCH’s OLO capability is expected to develop in phases, beginning with a group of early adopters before expanding as more participating banks become ready. The immediate opportunity in the U.S. is not necessarily to make every stage of an international payment instant. Instead, it aims to replace slower domestic entry or delivery with real-time processing, reducing the overall journey from days to minutes, or even seconds in eligible cases.

This development presents an opportunity for Canada, too. Its national payment clearing and settlement infrastructure, Payments Canada, estimates that roughly four-fifths of the country’s cross-border payments are currently routed through U.S. correspondent banks.²  For payments between the two markets, TCH’s OLO model could accelerate the U.S.-dollar leg via RTP, supporting time-sensitive use cases like urgent payments outside business hours, insurance disbursements and supplier payments.

By the fourth quarter of 2026, this scheme will be supplemented with the launch of Canada’s Real-Time Rail (RTR). Compatible instant payment infrastructure on both sides of the corridor could enable near-real-time processing for both the Canadian and U.S. legs of a payment. While the cross-border component would still rely on existing international arrangements, this model could significantly reduce delays at both ends of the payment journey and move the corridor closer to an end-to-end real-time experience.

A Global Opportunity

The broader prospect here is the establishment of compatible OLO arrangements at both ends of all major payment corridors. A primary example is the one between the U.S. and Europe, which together form the world’s largest bilateral trade and investment relationship, with transatlantic trade in goods and services exceeding €1.77 trillion in 2025.³

OLO is not, however, intended to replace existing international payment networks. Instead, it complements schemes already in place to improve the overall cross-border payment experience, such as Swift’s new retail cross-border payments initiative, announced in September 2025. Built on the existing Swift network, the initiative aims to standardize how banks process international payments for consumers and small businesses, including the provision of greater certainty over fees, full-value delivery without deductions, end-to-end tracking and more consistent service levels.

Together, Swift’s retail cross-border payments initiative and OLO can address different elements of the payment journey. Where Swift’s initiative provides the common international framework, messaging and visibility needed to move payments between banks and markets, OLO schemes accelerate the domestic entry or delivery leg via an instant payment system. 

In the instances where the requisite domestic infrastructure is available, the combination of these two models can support a faster and more predictable end-to-end cross-border payment experience, as mandated by the G20 Roadmap.⁴

Making OLO Work at Scale

Realizing the full potential of OLO schemes will require progress across several key areas.

First, common standards are essential. While ISO 20022 provides a shared messaging foundation, greater alignment is needed between the different schemas and market practices used by domestic and cross-border payment systems. Cross-border adoption will also require continued alignment across regulatory, compliance and market practices to reduce friction as payments move between jurisdictions.

Second, banks will need to manage much of the underlying complexity for clients — including message conversion, payment eligibility, routing and confirmation — thus ensuring OLO can be accessed via the most appropriate and familiar cross-border channels. Clear rules will also be needed to determine which payments are eligible for OLO and route them to the most appropriate rail, while maintaining a consistent client experience. This will require support from a resilient 24/7/365 infrastructure, including always-on liquidity management, compliance screening, fraud controls and exception handling.

Finally, realizing the full potential of OLO will depend on broad participation across banks, payment providers and domestic instant payment schemes. As adoption grows, reach and usability will continue to improve, creating a stronger network effect for all participants.

With these foundations in place, OLO offers a pragmatic way to extend the benefits of domestic instant payments across borders. Rather than replacing correspondent banking or requiring entirely new global rails, this scheme builds on existing relationships and infrastructures to meet the objectives of the G20 Roadmap — and ensure international payments are faster and more predictable by the end of 2027. 

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