Maritime Payments: Why Moving Money in Shipping Is So Hard

The payment surface of one vessel

A single vessel generates payments across an unusually wide surface: crew wages to a dozen countries, allotments to family accounts, port disbursements in local currency, bunker suppliers, spare parts vendors, class societies, flag administrations, insurers and — since 2026 — emissions allowance purchases.

Each of those crosses a border, a currency and a compliance screen. Shipping is one of the most payment-intensive industries in the world relative to its revenue, and it runs on infrastructure that was not designed for it.

The five frictions

1. Correspondent banking chains

A payment from a European bank to a supplier in a smaller jurisdiction may pass through two or three intermediary banks, each deducting a fee and adding a day. The sender sees the amount sent; the beneficiary sees the amount received. The gap is real money and it is rarely measured.

2. Settlement delay

Payments that take days rather than seconds create operational risk in a business measured in hours. An agent who has not been funded may not order tugs. A supplier who has not been paid may not release spares.

3. FX spread

Shipping deals in dollars but pays in dozens of currencies. Spreads applied at each conversion are usually invisible in the invoice and material in aggregate.

4. Failed and returned payments

Incorrect beneficiary details, closed accounts, name mismatches. Each failure is a rework cycle, and where the beneficiary is a seafarer's family, it is also a welfare problem.

5. Compliance holds

Sanctions and AML screening is necessary and non-negotiable. It also produces false positives — common names, ambiguous ports, similar entity names — and each one requires manual resolution. Payments to and from certain jurisdictions attract routine additional scrutiny.

What good looks like

That last row is the single most useful change most operators can make. Until the amount received is measured, the cost of the payment path is invisible and therefore unmanaged.

The crew dimension

Crew payments deserve separate treatment because they carry a compliance obligation and a retention consequence. MLC 2006 requires monthly payment, a written account of amounts due and paid, and a means for seafarers to transmit earnings to their families at reasonable charge and a fair exchange rate.

With a shortfall of 39,100 certificated officers, an ILO minimum for able seafarers of USD 690 rising to USD 715 by 2028, and the top five supply countries providing 56.25% of the workforce, payment reliability into those corridors is a competitive matter as much as an administrative one.

New rails, old obligations

Operators are exploring faster settlement mechanisms, including regulated digital settlement, to reduce cost and delay. Any such arrangement has to satisfy the same requirements as any other: the seafarer or supplier must consent, MLC obligations on wages must be met, financial regulation in the relevant jurisdictions applies, sanctions screening still applies, and — critically for crew — the seafarer must not carry volatility risk on wages already earned.

Faster rails solve delay. They do not remove compliance obligations, and any proposition that suggests otherwise should be treated with caution.

A practical improvement programme

1. Measure amount received versus amount sent, by corridor, for one quarter
2. Rank corridors by total leakage
3. Consolidate payment paths in the worst corridors
4. Pre-verify beneficiary data and enforce a change-control process
5. Move screening earlier in the flow to reduce late holds
6. Give operations visibility of payment status
7. Report failed payment rate monthly as a KPI