Freight and Funds
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Three of us in Rotterdam, reading payment data nobody else reads.

We came out of freight forwarding, not banking. That is the whole reason this site exists: we spent years explaining to customers why a payment marked complete had not arrived, and never found a page that explained it properly.

The data turned out to be public. Swift publishes speed. The World Bank prices corridors quarterly. The Asian Development Bank measures who gets refused. None of it is written for the person running the shipment.

Editorial rules

Four rules.

01
No commission from anybody
We take no payment from banks, payment providers or forwarders, and there are no affiliate links on this site.
02
Two sources when they disagree
Where Swift and the FSB report different speeds, both appear with their definitions. We do not average conflicting measures into a single comfortable number.
03
Every figure dated
Corridor prices move every quarter. A number without the date we read it is a number nobody can check.
04
Gaps stay visible
Where the data does not exist, we write that it does not exist and name who declined to provide it.

We do not give financial, legal or trade advice. For a decision that carries real consequence, take advice from somebody qualified who knows your contract and your corridor.

How we check a figure

Four rules we apply before printing a number

It has to be dated. A percentage without a period is not a fact, it is a mood. Every figure on this site carries the quarter or the year it belongs to.

It has to be downloadable. If we cannot link to the document the number lives in, we do not print the number. Trade press quoting trade press is not a source.

The definition travels with it. Swift's hour and the FSB's hour count different events, so we quote both with what each one measures.

A gap is printed as a gap. Where we could not verify something we say so on the page, and name who declined to answer.

What we do not do

We do not take commission from banks or payment providers, and nothing on this site is a referral link.

We do not reconstruct country-level figures from press releases when the underlying series is published at regional level. Two of those tables were dropped for that reason and the reasons are in the journal.

We do not publish a range we cannot source, even when the range is widely repeated. The discrepancy rate at stage 6 is the current example.

The sources we read

Swift for how fast payments cross the network and reach the account, restated in press releases with their own definitions.

Financial Stability Board for the G20 targets and the annual measurement against them.

World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide for corridor cost, quarterly, with the sample size stated.

Asian Development Bank for the trade finance gap and rejection rates, and the ICC for Incoterms and the rules banks apply to documents.