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iBanFirst said the US dollar accounted for 70% of international payments made by its UK business clients in the first half of 2026, little changed from 72% in 2025.
That was higher than across its European client base, where the dollar accounted for 54% of payments in the same period. The gap with Europe was also 16 percentage points in 2025, when the comparable figure was 56%.
The data is drawn from iBanFirst's own customer base rather than the wider UK market. It measures the number of payments, not their total value, and is based on more than 250,000 SWIFT payments in 2025 and nearly 150,000 in the first half of 2026.
The figures suggest UK businesses using the platform remain heavily reliant on the dollar for cross-border transactions despite wider political debate about reducing dependence on the US currency. That can leave firms exposed to exchange-rate moves if they have not fixed a rate in advance.
iBanFirst said a 1% move in GBP/USD over one or two days would change the sterling cost of a $1 million payment by about £7,600 if it were made at the prevailing exchange rate. It added that 20% of its UK clients use an FX forward payment to agree an exchange rate in advance for underlying dollar payments.
Sticky use
The company attributed the persistence of dollar use largely to invoicing practices set by suppliers.
"Dollar invoicing is often set by the supplier, not the buyer," said Vivek Savani, UK Country Manager at iBanFirst. "A UK business importing from Asia or the US is frequently just quoted in dollars. Changing that usually means renegotiating a supply contract, not just adjusting a payment instruction, which is why it doesn't happen quickly even when the political conversation has moved on."
He added that political discussion had moved faster than day-to-day corporate payment behaviour.
"De-dollarisation is moving much faster in political rhetoric than in corporate behaviour," Savani said. "Commercial relationships and payment habits are much stickier than geopolitics."
Key corridors
The data also pointed to a shift in where UK clients are sending dollar payments. USD to China and USD to Hong Kong were the two most common corridors for UK outbound payments in the first half of 2026, together accounting for a quarter of the payments tracked by number.
Neither corridor appeared among the UK's six largest payment routes in 2025, when the smallest of those top six accounted for less than 1% of payments. That indicates a sharp rise in the relative importance of the two Asian corridors within iBanFirst's UK client base.
Settlement times on those routes also tend to be slower than payments to the US or within the UK, Savani said, reflecting factors beyond currency choice.
"That's partly down to time zones, and partly down to the extra compliance and sanctions screening that payments into these corridors can attract. It's a separate question from currency risk, though, which depends on when a business fixes its exchange rate, not on how long the payment takes to clear," he said.
The dollar's position on those routes remains strong, though some shifts are beginning to emerge in Asian trade settlement patterns.
"We're already seeing some trade tensions push exporters towards settling in renminbi, though its share of global payments is still small," Savani said. "There are also central bank-backed platforms being built specifically to give Asian economies a way to settle trade without routing through the dollar. None of that changes the picture today, but it's worth UK businesses watching, especially those increasingly paying into these corridors."
Founded in 2016, iBanFirst serves more than 10,000 businesses and says it processes more than €2.5 billion in transactions each month across 140 countries.