Remittances, Payroll and trade: Who moves more cross-border money?

Wholesale cross-border payments move far more money than personal remittances.  

The IMF estimates the 2023 global cross-border payments market at roughly $190 trillion, with about $145 trillion in wholesale flows and $45 trillion in retail.  

But those two buckets contain very different transactions, and the popular habit of comparing "what businesses send" with "what workers send" mixes categories that were never designed to sit side by side. Let’s explore: 

• How cross-border money splits into wholesale, retail, B2B, and personal transfers 
• Where currency conversion creates real exposure for businesses and individuals 
• What the US and Canadian numbers actually show (and what they don't) 
• Why trade value and payment volume are not the same number 

What counts as a "cross-border payment"? 

The phrase covers everything from a bank moving liquidity between subsidiaries to a construction worker sending $300 to family in Guatemala. Those transactions share almost nothing except crossing a border, and treating them as one category produces bad comparisons.

The World Bank defines personal remittances as the sum of personal transfers and employee compensation. Payments Canada further separates B2B trade payments from B2P payments (salaries, benefits, marketplace payouts) and P2P payments, which include remittances. 

The chain from payroll to remittance runs through two separate transactions.  

A company pays a worker (B2P). The worker later decides to send part of that income to family abroad (P2P). Counting both as "remittances" would double-count the money.  

Counting only the company payment as a "business contribution to remittances" erases the worker's role in deciding whether and how much to send. 

Industries with large migrant or offshore workforces — agriculture, construction, hospitality, healthcare outsourcing — sit at the start of that chain.  

The global revenue cycle management market alone reached $385.4 billion in 2025, with significant offshore operations in India, the Philippines, and Pakistan. MedHeave’s illustrative model estimates US revenue from third-party RCM vendors at about US$50 billion₁ in 2026. 

But a US medical group paying an offshore RCM vendor is a B2B transaction.  

The vendor's payroll to local employees is a separate domestic payment. If one of those employees later sends money to family in another country, that is the remittance.  

Public data cannot assign a reliable remittance total to any of these industries. 

How large are wholesale flows compared to remittances? 

The IMF's February 2025 Fintech Note, drawing on FXC Intelligence estimates, puts the split at roughly $145 trillion wholesale and $45 trillion retail for 2023. The wholesale category is broader than most people assume (it includes financial institutions, investors, and corporations, not just companies paying vendors). 

Within the retail market, the IMF estimates B2B payments at about 85% of retail cross-border payment value. C2C payments, which include personal remittances, account for about 4%. Remittances make up nearly half of that C2C slice. 

The gap is enormous by dollar value. But scale alone misses the point.  

A $50 million interbank liquidity transfer and a $400 remittance to the Philippines operate in completely different cost structures, with different FX markups, different speed expectations, and different consequences for the people on each end (a reality that surfaces repeatedly in the data but most comparisons quietly ignore). 

What do the US and Canadian numbers show? 

Neither country publishes a clean, current breakdown of all business payments versus all personal remittances sent. The available data come from different sources, different years, and different populations. 

The Statistics Canada survey found that 37% of the studied population sent money abroad in 2017, with full-time workers sending an average of C$3,135 per year.  

Employment clearly correlates with the ability to remit, but public data cannot assign a remittance total to specific industries or employers (a gap unlikely to close without proprietary payment-provider data). 

The trade figure is the trickiest. $872.3 billion in bilateral trade does not mean $872.3 billion crossed the border as payment transactions.  

Invoices may be paid at different dates, in different currencies, netted against other obligations, or hedged through forward contracts. Trade value and payment volume are related but not interchangeable. 

Where does currency conversion create exposure? 

At every stage of the cross-border payment chain. The FX markup, not the stated transfer fee, tends to be the larger expense for both firms and individuals.  

And while USD/CAD movements affect final amounts on both sides, remittance volumes are too small relative to macro flows to move the pair on their own. 

Business margins 

The Bank of Canada's October 2026 study of Canadian B2B cross-border payments found that banks' total sender margins ran around 2% to 3.5% of transaction value in the sampled quotes. FX margins accounted for most of that cost, not the separately stated transfer fee.  

The studied margins varied substantially by bank, corridor, and amount (so "Canadian firms lose 3% on every payment" would overstate a sample-specific finding, but the directional insight holds). 

Remittance costs 

For individuals sending money internationally, the cost arithmetic works differently, but the principle is similar. The Federal Reserve reports a 2025 US average remittance cost of 5.6% for a $200 transfer and 3.8% for $500, using a simple average.  

The SmaRT benchmark, which tracks the three cheapest qualifying services per corridor, drops those figures to 2.8% and 1.9%. 

Speed has improved alongside cost. About 61.4% of US-origin remittances arrived within one hour in 2025, compared with a global average of 54.4%.  

Services like RemitBee let Canadians compare real exchange rates against the mid-market rate before sending, separating the provider's FX markup from actual market movement in USD/CAD. 

Rate exposure 

A sender can face a poor conversion rate even when the headline exchange rate looks stable. USD/CAD affects both sides of the cross-border payment chain, but remittance flows alone do not drive the pair.  

FX rates respond to monetary policy expectations, commodity prices, capital flows, and risk sentiment. Remittances represent an important retail use case and a lens on payment-cost transparency, not a spot-market mover.