What would it take to make cross-border payments an enabler of SME growth?

Six years into the G20 Cross-Border Payments Roadmap, high costs, slow settlement, and complex compliance requirements continue to hold small businesses back. Meanwhile, agentic AI, stablecoins and real-time payment networks are opening new possibilities for paying across borders. In the face of tariffs and fragmentation of trade, improving payments offers governments a practical way to support trade through domestic action.

Drawing on From Friction to Flow 2.0, a new Nextrade Group study of 1,100 SME importers across Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Thailand and dozens of policies shaping crossborder payments around the world economies, this workshop will explore where reform can make the greatest difference. The report’s Cross-Border Payments Enablement Index benchmarks 34 economies across six policy pillars, providing a roadmap for reforms that enable businesses to trade more effectively.

Participants will work with the findings to identify priority barriers and develop actionable, country-specific reform roadmaps. The focus: turning evidence into practical steps to reduce friction, improve payment flows and unlock opportunities for SMEs.

SMEs in developing economies face a financing gap that remains in the trillions, and it is growing faster than the economies themselves. Supply alone will not close it. Policy, data and market infrastructure must develop alongside it.

This roundtable brings ministers responsible for SMEs together with leaders from payments, fintech, banking and development finance. It looks at three questions:

• Which cross-border payment and trade-finance rails would help SMEs sell abroad?
• How can governments crowd in private lending at scale?
• What role should the public sector play in enabling digital lending, including alternative data and AI credit scoring?

As a Singapore stop on the Road to Geneva, the discussion will produce priorities for the 2nd Global SME Ministerial Meeting in May 2027 and for the SME Trade Finance Facility.

The white-collar skills that have historically lifted millions out of poverty across emerging economies are now facing disruption from AI. In the Philippines alone, the ILO estimates that more than a quarter of the workforce — some 12.7 million workers — holds jobs at risk of being displaced by AI automation. Most of these roles will be transformed rather than eliminated outright, but the shift is already reshaping what "job-ready" means for graduates and mid-career workers alike.

This roundtable brings together policymakers, regulators, educators, and industry leaders to confront the anxiety facing today's fresh graduates and mid-careerists, many of whom were trained for a job market that is changing faster than their curricula can keep pace with. Panelists will chart the policy interventions, employer strategies, and new models of education that will define career pathways for the next generation of workers in emerging economies.