Anyone who has ever waited for an important transfer knows the unpleasant feeling: the money has left the account, but the recipient still does not see it. Until now Ukrainians have depended on bank hotlines or screenshots from mobile apps to understand where the payment is stuck. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) wants to change this with a new online money flow map that will visualise the path of non cash payments through the national system.
What the NBU is building: unified payment statuses and a public map
The project is based on the data of the System of Electronic Payments (SEP), through which almost all interbank transfers in hryvnia pass. The NBU plans to introduce a standard set of statuses that every payment will go through, for example: “payment initiated”, “processed by sender bank”, “passed through SEP”, “credited to recipient’s bank”. Banks will be able to show these statuses in their apps, and the regulator will aggregate the information on its portal.
The public interface is described as an online map of money flows that will show how funds move between banks and regions in real time or close to real time. For ordinary clients this means the ability to check whether a transfer is already in the clearing system or whether it is still waiting inside the sending bank. For businesses it is a tool to monitor mass payments to suppliers, employees or customers and quickly detect bottlenecks.
Impact on banks, fintechs and customer service
For the banking sector the project effectively creates a unified tracking standard similar to parcel tracking in logistics. Instead of each bank inventing its own internal statuses, there will be a common language that all participants understand. This should:
- reduce the load on call centres and complaints to banks and the NBU;
- make it easier for fintech companies to integrate with different banks through standard APIs;
- improve monitoring of delays and technical incidents in payment processing;
- increase trust in cashless payments among the population and SMEs.
For fintechs and paytech providers, a transparent view of the SEP pipeline opens opportunities to build value added services: dashboards for treasurers, alert systems for failed payments, reconciliation tools for marketplaces and payroll platforms.
Data protection and open data potential
The NBU emphasises that the map will not show personal data of clients. The regulator will work only with technical information about routes and timestamps of payments. Public visualisations can be anonymised and aggregated by bank, region or sector, while detailed information about a specific payment will remain available only to the client through their bank.
At the same time, aggregated data on money flows between regions and sectors can become a powerful open data set for analysts and investors. It will help to better understand consumption patterns, the speed of government payments, and the resilience of different parts of the economy during wartime and reconstruction.
Why this matters for investors and the digital economy
The online money flow map is part of a broader trend: Ukraine is turning its central bank into a digital platform that sets standards for instant payments, open APIs and transparency. For investors this signals a market where payment risks are easier to measure and operational problems are spotted quickly. For local IT companies it is a chance to build analytics, monitoring and compliance solutions on top of NBU infrastructure.
If the project is successfully implemented and extended with APIs for developers, Ukraine can become one of the most transparent payment markets in the region – with clear rules for banks and real time visibility for businesses and citizens.
