Correspondent banking — the web of relationships that lets a payment leave one country and arrive in another — has been contracting for over a decade, and 2026 hasn't reversed the trend. Global banks continue to close correspondent relationships they consider too costly to monitor relative to the volume they carry, a pattern usually described as "de-risking."
The effect isn't evenly spread. Well-served corridors between major financial centres remain fast and cheap. Corridors touching smaller markets, or jurisdictions perceived as higher-risk, increasingly route through longer chains of intermediary banks — which means more fees, more delay, and more points where a payment can be paused for additional checks.
What's worth understanding: this is an infrastructure trend, not a policy targeted at any one client. A payment can slow down not because anything about the sender or recipient changed, but because a bank in the middle of the chain quietly closed a relationship on a route it no longer found worthwhile.
What this means for clients: for anyone routinely moving funds between multiple jurisdictions, it's worth treating "which bank, which corridor" as an active decision rather than a fixed given — the fastest route between two countries today isn't guaranteed to stay that way. We factor current corridor reliability into which banking relationships we recommend for clients with recurring cross-border flows, not just which bank will open the account.