Payments Academy

Cross-Border Payments

Cross-border payments from the ground up to professional depth: correspondent banking and nostro/vostro, the serial and cover methods with the exact SWIFT and ISO 20022 messages at every step, charges and FX, gpi tracking, exceptions and returns, corporate MT101 payments, documentary collections and MT400, standby letters of credit, and the SEPA, UK and US schemes the payment travels through. Built from the full Paiementor cross-border material, including the reader questions and answers.

131Core lessons
19Chapters
9.6Hours of narration
4Simulators

Who this is for

Working payments professionals and business analysts who need to explain, design, or fix cross-border payments end to end.

Prerequisites

A basic idea of what a payment is. The track starts from the four-corner model and builds up.

Recommended sequence

Work through the chapters in this order. Within each chapter, complete the core lessons listed.

  1. The Payment Ecosystem (Lessons 3-3)
    Intermediary banks and correspondent banking: why a payment needs banks in between.
  2. Accounts and balances (All lessons)
    Accounts and balances: nostro and vostro are accounts, and the ledger is where the money moves.
  3. Ledger, posting and reconciliation (All lessons)
    Ledger, posting and reconciliation: booking entries for a cross-border payment, loro and mirror accounts.
  4. Correspondent Banking and Nostro Vostro (All lessons)
    Correspondent banking and nostro/vostro: the accounts the money actually moves through, liquidity, reconciliation and de-risking.
  5. Serial vs Cover Payments (All lessons)
    Serial versus cover: the two ways a payment travels, step by step, with the MT103, MT202 COV, pacs.008 and pacs.009 messages and the INDA, INGA, COVE and CLRG codes.
  6. Charges, FX and gpi Tracking (All lessons)
    Charges, FX and gpi tracking: OUR, SHA and BEN worked examples, foreign exchange, and end-to-end tracking with the UETR.
  7. Cross-Border Exceptions (All lessons)
    Cross-border exceptions: rejects, returns, recalls, investigations and reason codes, with timelines and who bears the cost.
  8. Claims, enquiries and case management (All lessons)
    Claims, enquiries and case management: camt.057, pacs.028, camt.027, camt.087, case lifecycle, stop and recall.
  9. Cross-border investigations (All lessons)
    Cross-border investigations: missing MT103, missing MT202 COV, wrong intermediary, delayed payment, compliance hold, charges discrepancy, duplicate, recall, cancellation, return.
  10. Cash management (All lessons)
    Cash management: sweeping, pooling and forecasting for corporates moving money across borders.
  11. MT101 in Depth (All lessons)
    MT101 in depth: the corporate request for transfer, Sequence A and Sequence B, field 50a, multiple debit accounts, subsidiary accounts and funds repatriation.
  12. Documentary Collections and SWIFT Category 4 (All lessons)
    Documentary collections and MT400: remitting bank and collecting bank, SWIFT Category 4 messages, and the MT400 advice of payment.
  13. Standby Letter of Credit (All lessons)
    Standby letter of credit: issuance step by step, standby versus commercial letter of credit, UCP 600 and ISP98.
  14. Europe: SEPA and T2 (All lessons)
    SEPA: SCT, SDD and SCT Inst end to end, with the pain.001, pacs.008, pacs.002, pacs.004, camt.056 and camt.029 messages at each step.
  15. UK: Faster Payments, CHAPS, BACS (All lessons)
    UK schemes: BACS, CHAPS and Faster Payments end to end.
  16. US: Fedwire, FedNow, ACH, CHIPS (All lessons)
    US schemes: Fedwire, FedNow, ACH and CHIPS end to end, and how a US payment flows.
  17. Global instant systems (All lessons)
    Global instant systems: NPP, Pix, PayNow, PromptPay, SPEI, Buna, US RTP and SEPA Request to Pay, the instant rails a cross-border payment can land on.
  18. Complete ISO 20022 Catalogue (All lessons)
    ISO 20022 messages in depth: pacs.002, pacs.003, pacs.004, pacs.008, pacs.009 and the camt messages, with field-level detail and the MT103 to pacs.008 transformation.
  19. Indian Payments Deep Dive: NACH, BBPS, FEMA (Lessons 7-7)
    Cross-border payments from India: SWIFT, nostro, vostro and the Indian context.

Simulators and labs

Assessments

Capstone: Trace a cross-border payment end to end

Take a USD 10,000 payment from a customer in India to a supplier in Brazil and trace it through the full correspondent chain, naming every message, every debit and credit, every charge, and where it can stop.

Deliverable: A written end-to-end trace naming each bank, each message (MT103, MT202 COV, pacs.008, pacs.009), each nostro debit and credit, the OUR/SHA/BEN charge treatment, and the gpi tracking reference.

Completion criteria