In payments, speed thrills

Payments have changed a lot over the last decade. But amid all the fancy bells and whistles, the key to the customer experience is speed.

"The team behind ANZ’s new IMT feature had focussed on “three key pillars” of consumer experience through the design process: speed, price and transparency."

That’s the view of Andrew Brown, Senior Product Owner, Australia Retail at ANZ, who said the rise in use of cross-border payments was reshaping what customers want — and expect.

Australia’s cross-border payments market — generally considered “more expensive, more opaque and slower than domestic payments”, according to the Reserve Bank of Australia — has grown rapidly. A 2025 report showed more than $A38 billion was sent offshore from Australia in 2024 in remittances alone. A rise in offerings from fintech groups has lifted competition and lowered costs. 

Speaking to ANZ bluenotes on podcast, Brown said the initial consumer focus when first making an offshore payment tends to be on price — a focus that has shifted in “the last five to 10 years, with the emergence of the fintechs in that space”.

“But once [they] submit the payment, the speed is, in my opinion, what actually determines the quality of experience,” he said. 

“Where payment is faster than you expect, or very fast… most people are quite amazed that it processes and it's already there.”

Brown made the comments on a podcast with Hagan Shakespeare, Acting Head of Global Cross Border Products at ANZ, ahead of the launch of ANZ’s upgraded International Money Transfers service feature on ANZ Plus.

You can listen to an edited version of the conversation below. 

Audio

Frequency

According to ANZ, the IMT service on ANZ Plus will provide customers the ability to send funds to more than 250 destinations in the bank’s global network, in many cases in near-real time. The feature provides advanced fraud detection including ANZ’s Falcon technology, as well as in-app tracking and estimated payment delivery times.

Shakespeare said the landscape for international payments has changed rapidly, not just in terms of volume, but in frequency and purpose of use.

“And now with the growth in our migrant communities, etcetera, there's a lot more of that movement back home to families,” he said. “And it's really become part of that everyday financial life for a lot of Australians.”

Shakespeare said advancements in domestic payments, thanks to the New Payments Platform providing feature such as 24-by-seven access and confirmation of payee, has begun to influence consumer expectations for cross-border transactions.

“[Those features] really drive a payment expectation,” he said. “And there's that shift now from not just having that payment expectation for our domestic market, but also for our cross-border market.”

Part of that expectation is speed, according to Shakespeare. But banks are stepping up to meet that demand, he said, including “huge” improvement into some offshore markets compared to what has been seen previously.  

“The overall network, our Swift reachability is, is much better,” Shakespeare said. “And the speed has improved out of sight [compared] to where we used to be.

“Banks have really stepped up what we can offer from that end-to-end payment experience.”

Pillars

Brown said the team behind ANZ’s new IMT feature had focussed on “three key pillars” of consumer experience through the design process: “speed, price and transparency”.

“And there's some really common pain points in the cross-border experience historically for customers around that,” he said. “How much is it going to cost? How long is it going to take? Where's my payment at?

“And I think we've done a really good... prioritising those.”

Shakespeare said the ability of fintechs in the market to address those pain points had led to increased usage off cross-border payments, but also fragmentation. 

“There’s a multitude of different options now that consumers have, and that can lead to different experiences,” he said. “There’s less visibility across their transactions. Security and controls across the different providers may differ quite substantially as well. 

“I think there is a role that we can play as a bank to help our customers avoid the need for fragmentation, by delivering a cross-border payment solution that can compete and meet those cost, transparency [and other needs] while staying within a banking environment.”

The experts also touched on growth in global payments networks connecting in order to provide 24-by-seven consumer experiences, and ANZ’s role in a Swift initiative aimed at uplifting the customer experience and supporting industry progress toward the G20 cross-border payments goals. Listen to the podcast above to find out more. 

This story reflects an edited version of the conversation as it appears on tape.