A 2026 study by Yuning Yu examines how settlement delays transmit foreign-exchange risk to consumers, with related research considering digital pricing disclosure and consumer protection in the United States.
— The G20’s Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments reaffirmed an international target, set under United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10.c, of reducing the average cost of sending a $200 remittance to less than 3 percent by 2030. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database put the global average at about 6.36 percent in the third quarter of 2025, more than double that goal. Against this gap, a 2026 study examines settlement time as a structural mechanism through which foreign-exchange risk enters the effective cost of cross-border payments.
The study, Structural Inefficiencies in Cross-border Digital Payments (Economics and Management Innovation, February 2026), addresses a problem the field usually treats as fragmented. Transaction cost, settlement speed, and exposure to foreign-exchange fluctuations are commonly studied in isolation; the paper instead traces them to a shared institutional source and asks how the timing of settlement shapes what a payment ultimately costs the consumer.
It decomposes a payment’s total cost into explicit handling fees, the time-related cost of settlement delay, and the implicit cost of foreign-exchange movement, positioning settlement time as a central transmission channel through which exchange-rate risk reaches the consumer. The paper shows how the trade-off between cost efficiency and payment predictability plays out differently depending on settlement speed, with longer cycles potentially reducing nominal fees while increasing effective consumer costs through greater FX exposure. Developed as a structural, mechanism-based analysis, the framework does not rely on empirical estimation.
The practical implication is that a transfer advertised with a lower upfront fee may not be less expensive overall if a longer settlement period leaves the recipient exposed to an unfavorable exchange-rate movement before the money arrives. The paper adds a consumer-behavior layer, observing that opaque fee structures raise the cognitive burden on users, so that a payment’s perceived cost may diverge from its nominal price. From this analysis, it derives system-level directions for improvement, among them reducing structural costs, clearer pre-disclosure of fees and exchange-rate spreads, shorter settlement cycles, and design that accounts for how consumers understand and trust payment systems.
The framework is presented as relevant to the United States, where cross-border remittances, financial inclusion, and consumer protection are named as policy priorities and where consumers often cannot readily compare the true cost of competing transfer options. Related work by the same author supports the direction. A July 2026 study, Digital Financial Pricing Disclosure and Consumer Trust (Journal of Business and Economic Studies), provides experimental evidence on transparency: in a scenario experiment with 965 participants, moving from the least to the most transparent interface design was associated with a rise in participants correctly identifying a product’s total cost, from 52.1 to 86.3 percent. Another related study applies a unified data-driven governance framework to a large internet wealth management platform, reducing high-risk holdings from 23.6% to 15.2% and consumer complaints from 3.8 to 2.1 per 10,000 households within twelve months, with implications for U.S. digital investment platforms. Taken together, this related research suggests that clearer disclosure can inform the design of consumer financial protection, without claiming to determine it.
Yuning Yu, the author of the cross-border payments study and the related papers, brings a background in fintech product marketing, growth strategy, and consumer behavior. As a Product Marketing Manager at Remitly, a company that facilitates cross-border money transfers through digital channels, she has experience in product positioning, pricing, and customer research for digital financial products, alongside a master’s degree in business analytics from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
Across the three papers, the research identifies a gap in U.S. regulation: existing frameworks define disclosure and consumer-protection obligations but provide limited guidance on interface and algorithmic design. With 53.6 million Americans using buy-now-pay-later loans in 2023, the findings suggest that consumer outcomes depend not only on legal mandates but also on how platforms implement them.
Contact Info:
Name: Yuning Yu
Email: Send Email
Organization: Yuning Yu
Website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=I-ZdZO8AAAAJ
Release ID: 89201837
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