Convera, a commercial payments provider, has launched a global report warning that businesses face a growing “volatility gap” — the widening distance between how quickly money moves across borders and how effectively companies manage the currency risk tied to those movements.
The report, titled “The Volatility Gap: Why Payments Innovation Doesn’t Solve Currency Risk,” finds that a decade of progress in cross-border payments has not been matched by comparable progress in managing currency exposure. Real-time settlement rails, stablecoins and the rollout of the ISO 20022 messaging standard have all improved how fast and transparently money crosses borders, but Convera argues that currency risk itself has been largely left unaddressed.
Global foreign-exchange turnover reached $9.5 trillion a day in April 2025, up 27% from 2022, according to the Bank for International Settlements, as businesses increased their use of FX markets to manage exposure amid heightened volatility.
The report points to several trends underlying the gap. Bibby Financial Services’ 2026 International Trade Report found that 44% of importers and exporters say currency movements have eroded their profit margins, with global conflict overtaking tariffs, inflation and interest rates as their top economic concern. Meanwhile, up to 75% of payments on the Swift network now reach the beneficiary’s bank within 10 minutes, but Convera notes that a real-time payment is still priced at whatever exchange rate applies the moment it is sent, leaving businesses exposed to rate movements between payment cycles.
Stablecoins present a similar limitation, according to the report. Stablecoin market capitalization surged past $300 billion in 2026, yet stablecoins settle payments faster without changing the underlying value relationship between the currencies involved. Convera also cites projections from FXC Intelligence that the B2B cross-border payments market will reach $51.2 trillion by 2033, a scale that would multiply the number of currency corridors businesses need to manage as they expand into new markets.
Convera argues that closing the volatility gap requires businesses to treat payments, FX and risk management as one integrated discipline rather than separate functions. The report recommends matching the timing of hedging strategies to actual payment dates, building a currency risk framework suited to a business’s specific exposure, and embedding FX decisions directly into everyday payment workflows instead of treating them as an afterthought.
“A faster payment is not necessarily a safer commercial outcome. A business can move money in seconds and still lose margin because the currency exposure was unmanaged for weeks or months beforehand. Businesses have made huge progress modernising payment infrastructure, but many are still managing currency exposure as an afterthought. That leaves margins, forecasts and growth plans exposed at exactly the moment finance leaders need more certainty,” said Patrick Gauthier, Group CEO at Convera.
