Prefunding gaps in 2027: the days you can't fund a corridor but payouts keep running

By Funmi Soewu · 29 October 2026 · Original research

Why this matters

A remittance company funds each corridor from the sending country and pays out in the receiving country. When the sending country's banks are shut and the receiving country's are open, customers keep sending, the payout partner keeps paying, and nothing can top it up until the funding side reopens. Every one of those days has to be prefunded in advance. A cash view built only from the company's own bank accounts shows the funding account untouched on those days; the balance that runs down sits with the payout partner.

The corridors with the most holiday gaps

Weekdays in 2027 when the sending country's banks are closed for a national holiday and the receiving country's banks are open. A further 28 corridors have 8 holiday gap days each; the full table is below.

By sending country

Euro area senders (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Portugal) count T2 closing days only, so their figures are understated.

The weekend mismatch

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Bangladesh and Jordan have a Friday and Saturday weekend. A corridor sent from Riyadh or Doha cannot be funded on Fridays while most receiving countries pay out, and a corridor paying into Cairo, Dhaka or Amman pays out on Sundays while most sending countries' banks are shut. On 22 of the 152 corridors studied, that creates a funding gap every week, on top of holidays, so those corridors carry a day of payouts in advance every week of the year.

Every corridor

Download the data: prefunding-gaps-2027.csv. Free to use with credit to Polynopsis.

Method

For every corridor where we publish both a sending and a receiving market calendar, we checked each day of 2027. A funding gap day is a day when the sending country's banks are closed (weekend, public or bank holiday) and the receiving country's banks are open. Holiday dates come from our holiday calendars, built from government and central bank lists and fact-checked; dates not yet confirmed by an official 2027 list are counted; the table shows how many fall on the sending side (moon-sighted holidays, and fixed holidays whose 2027 list is not yet published, such as Canada's), and some receiving-side dates are also not yet confirmed. Weekends follow each calendar: Friday and Saturday in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Bangladesh and Jordan, Saturday and Sunday elsewhere. Euro area sending corridors use the T2 closing days only; national bank holidays in individual euro countries are not counted, so those corridors are understated. Regional, city and faith-only holidays are not counted; national bank holidays count even where the central bank keeps its settlement system open for part of the day. China's make-up working weekends are not modelled. These are the days when payout banks are open and funding is shut. Many payouts also run at weekends and on the receiving country's holidays, through instant payment systems, mobile money and cash pickup; on those corridors every sending-country weekend is a gap too (about 104 days in 2027), so these counts understate total exposure. Corridor costs are World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide averages for Q3 2025.

Where Polynopsis fits

Polynopsis works out runway for every corridor with these calendars built in, so a top-up leaves before the funding side closes, and it shows the payout partner's balance running down next to the bank accounts that fund it.