FMCG payments are the circulatory system of global growth. Every invoice you approve, every settlement you release, every compliance check you pass influences shelf availability, distributor trust, and the margin you can defend. In 2025, the world outside your walls is changing fast: the G20’s roadmap is pushing cross-border flows to be cheaper, faster, more transparent, and more accessible by end-2027, while ISO 20022’s structured data becomes the new common language for payments. If you’ve ever felt that the finance team spends too many hours pushing paper instead of moving the business, this is the year to flip the script—because automation is finally aligned with the rails, the rules, and the results the board wants.
Why 2025 is Automation’s Moment for FMCG payments
Two external forces converge to make automation practical and urgent. The first is policy. The G20-backed cross-border programme, led by BIS/CPMI and tracked by global supervisors, sets public targets on cost, speed, transparency, and access for payments by end-2027. Those targets create a shared scoreboard the CFO can point to when prioritising investment in FMCG payments automation. If your internal metrics don’t move in the same direction—down on total cost per $1,000, down on settlement time, up on visibility, up on reach—you’re swimming against the current. Bank for International Settlements+1
The second force is data. Swift reconfirmed that the CBPR+ coexistence period ends on 22 November 2025, pushing the world of cross-border instruction messages into ISO 20022. For FMCG leaders, this isn’t plumbing; it’s the pathway to fewer repairs, faster screenings, cleaner reconciliation, and automated status updates that remove “where is my money?” from your inbox. The countdown is real, and it’s a gift to teams ready to standardise. Swift+1
A third, quieter factor is the reality of friction. As a proxy, the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide still shows a global average of 6.49% for retail remittances (site updated Aug 18, 2025). Enterprise flows aren’t retail remittances, but the number signals how much cross-border friction persists in many corridors. When your automation programme cuts spread leakage, repair fees, and day-slips, you’re not shaving pennies—you’re reclaiming real money that the market still leaves on the table. Remittance Prices Worldwide
The Strategy Shift: From Back-Office Operator to Growth Enabler
Automation has long been pitched as a cost take-out lever. That story is true but incomplete. A modern FMCG payments stack turns finance into a growth enabler by collapsing the distance between a cash decision and a commercial outcome. When a distributor receives funds same-day with a readable remittance reference, sell-in accelerates. When treasury can commit to a budget rate because hedges and release windows are synchronised inside your system, promotions run without last-minute price changes. When exceptions resolve themselves with guided workflows, planners stop carrying buffer stock “just in case.” This is not about robots replacing people; it’s about elevating people to design controls, calibrate policies, and negotiate better corridors because the system finally does the pushing for them. Leading consultancies now frame automation as a way to reallocate effort from manual handling to analytic and strategic tasks—the work only humans can do—and that’s exactly where FMCG wins. Deloitte+1
The Data Foundation: ISO 20022 as the Spine of Automation
Automation without structure is chaos at scale. ISO 20022 solves that by enforcing the facts that matter to banks, screeners, and auditors: who is being paid, where they are, why the money is moving, and how the reference should read. Map your ERP or TMS export to populate legal names, structured addresses, purpose codes, and human-readable remittance information every time. With the coexistence period ending in November 2025, early movers get a double dividend: higher straight-through processing now, and a friction-free transition later. The result is a cleaner pipeline for FMCG payments where screenings pass faster, repairs drop, and reconciliation becomes “open the report” instead of “open the spreadsheet.” Swift+1
The Real Payoffs: Cost, Speed, Transparency, Access
Cost falls when you reduce spread slippage, partner fees, and repair charges; speed improves when messages are complete and rails are chosen with cut-offs in mind; transparency rises when status events are captured and streamed back to planners; access expands when your platform can reach local rails and wallets where bank coverage is thin. These aren’t abstract virtues—they’re the four pillars the G20 uses to judge progress. When your FMCG payments automation moves in lockstep with those pillars, your quarterly finance pack tells the same story the world wants to hear: cheaper, faster, clearer, broader. Bank for International Settlements
Fifteen Automation Plays That Free Capacity and Protect Margin
Start with the journey as it exists today and reimagine each stage so a human handles only the exceptions, the negotiations, and the strategy. Drafts should enter cleanly from approved payables, enriched with ISO 20022 fields and pre-validated bank coordinates so bounces are rare. Approvals should route based on corridor risk, amount, and counterparty status, not inbox habits; when a payment exceeds a threshold, the system can trigger rate-request workflows and store time-stamped quotes so execution quality becomes a measurable discipline. Screening should run automatically against sanctions and PEP lists with a guided resolver for partial matches; when data is complete and purpose codes are consistent, the number of false positives falls and so does the cycle time from “draft” to “release.” Swift
Release is where speed and certainty matter most. A modern stack selects the right rail for the right corridor, aligns to cut-offs, and if congestion is detected, shifts to a secondary route without manual firefighting. Status events stream back to operational teams so logistics can move with confidence. Reconciliation is the close of the loop: enriched references allow auto-matching, while unresolved items land in an exception queue with all supporting evidence attached. The cumulative effect is profound. Hours that once disappeared into email chains reappear as analysis time; money that once leaked into avoidable fees stays in the P&L.
Within that end-to-end rethink, you will find fifteen distinct plays that most FMCG teams can implement inside a quarter. Make ISO 20022 mapping non-negotiable. Turn on beneficiary pre-validation to catch bad data at the edge. Attach purpose codes consistently to shorten screenings. Enforce rate-request discipline for large tickets and store the quotes. Align release windows with corridor liquidity and cut-offs. Pilot instant or near-real-time rails where credible to narrow exposure time. Use structured, human-readable references so the close stops being a scavenger hunt. Introduce pay-on-milestone so funds move when goods do. Keep dual-rail options for critical lanes so throttling never becomes a crisis. Add a control-tower view so treasury, AP, and supply chain stare at the same truth. And—just as important—measure slippage, repair rates, false positives, and settlement time every week so improvements become habit, not hope. The more you automate, the more your people graduate to designing policies and managing partners instead of chasing status updates.
A Corridor-First Approach: Asia, Africa, and LATAM
Automation only works when it respects local reality. In Asia, the rise of instant paradigms and cross-border linkages means distributors increasingly expect same-day outcomes; UPI-linked corridors and broader fast-payment interlinking efforts prove that instant is not a novelty but a new normal in many lanes. Build your automation to route intelligently, choose rails that fit each corridor, and create release windows that exploit the speed on offer. The payoff is faster time-to-cash for partners and narrower gaps between hedge execution and final settlement. Bank for International Settlements
Africa is experiencing a different but equally significant transformation. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is expanding to enable local-currency settlement across participating central banks, and its planned Africa Currency Marketplace aims to deepen liquidity. For FMCG distributors moving value between African markets, an automated platform that understands PAPSS connectivity and can settle in local currencies without breaking compliance delivers fewer correspondent hops and a step-change in predictability. Treat those capabilities as configuration in your system, not bespoke heroics. Stanchion
LATAM’s story is that domestic instant schemes—Brazil’s Pix is the headline—reset expectations about speed and traceability even when the original leg is cross-border. Automation here has to respect that bar: if your payout lands quickly and cleanly with references distributors can read, inquiry volume drops and sell-in cycles tighten. From a CFO’s seat, that’s not just operational hygiene—it’s working capital improved by design.
Building Your Control Tower: Visibility That Moves the Business
A control tower for FMCG payments is not a dashboard you glance at; it is the operating room where finance and operations make decisions together. The ingredients are simple: status for every payment in flight, ETA by corridor and rail, exceptions with root-cause tags, and real-time FX spread and fee telemetry so treasury can see performance, not just results. When planners ask “can we ship earlier?” or sales asks “can we run that promotion next week?”, the answer should come from the same live screen. And when you brief the board, you should show not only that operations are stable but that they are improving along the four G20 pillars the outside world expects you to improve. Bank for International Settlements
Measuring What Matters: Turning Gains into ROI
Return on automation is not a mystery when you instrument the journey. Start by converting the obvious wins into dollars: lower partner fees, lower FX slippage on large tickets, fewer repair charges, fewer manual hours in screening and reconciliation. Then graduate to the compounders: fewer missed cut-offs (so fewer day-slips), lower inquiry volume from distributors (so fewer credits), shorter close at month-end (so less overtime and faster insights), and lower buffer inventory because time-to-cash is more reliable. If you need an external narrative to frame the prize, McKinsey’s latest Global Payments report explains the paradox of simpler front-ends and more complex back-ends—the precise problem automation is built to solve. Anchor your story in that reality, and your ROI has context beyond your four walls. McKinsey & Company
For a public barometer of friction, keep the World Bank RPW average on your scorecard. If retail corridors still average 6.49%, your enterprise lanes can almost certainly improve by advancing along the same dimensions the G20 champions. Automation is the means; the metrics are the proof. Remittance Prices Worldwide
The 90-Day Launch Plan
Begin with a baseline. In the first thirty days, pull ninety days of FMCG payments across your top corridors and calculate what a board cares about: all-in cost per $1,000 (including spreads and fees), average settlement time, on-time settlement against corridor SLAs, repair/reject rate, false-positive rate, and reconciliation cycle time. Map those metrics to the G20 pillars, not because it sounds good but because it forces you to measure the same way the world measures. Bank for International Settlements
Use the next thirty days to intervene. Complete ISO 20022 field mapping end-to-end and enable beneficiary pre-validation so errors are stopped at the source. Switch on automatic sanctions screening with guided resolution for partial matches. Enforce a simple RFQ rule for large tickets so execution quality becomes visible. Align release windows to corridor cut-offs and, where credible and compliant, pilot an instant or near-real-time option with one distributor. This is not a technology marathon; it’s a sequence of operating rules the system makes easy to follow. With the 22 November 2025 CBPR+ date approaching, your timing is not just smart—it is necessary. Swift
Spend the final thirty days measuring again. Re-run your metrics and translate the deltas into dollars saved, hours returned, days pulled out of time-to-cash, and a shorter monthly close. Bring the board a one-page exhibit that shows how your improvements map to cost, speed, transparency, and access—the very scoreboard BIS/CPMI uses to track global progress. This is how you convert automation from a budget line into a growth lever. Bank for International Settlements
Make it Real with FMCG Pay (CTA)
There are many ways to assemble this, but the fastest path is a platform built for your reality. FMCG Pay combines corridor-aware routing, ISO 20022-ready messaging, automated compliance, instant-rail options where credible, and a payments control tower that surfaces fees, FX, status, ETAs, and exceptions in one place. Your teams stop chasing emails and start managing outcomes. Your distributors get paid when they expect to be paid. Your board sees cost go down, speed go up, and transparency and access rise quarter after quarter.
Explore how we work on our About FMCG Pay page, then talk to us about a live corridor you want to optimise through automation on our contact page. If you need more context first, browse FMCG Pay for additional insights and case snapshots tailored to FMCG operators.