The scale alone underscores the stakes. The global cross-border payments market has reached $238 billion and is projected to grow steadily, while B2B flows are on track to hit $50 trillion by 2032.

Yet beneath that growth lies a system still defined by inefficiencies driven by multiple intermediaries, opaque fees and days-long settlement delays. A new economic bulletin from the European Central Bank (ECB) found that the global provision of correspondent banking services has declined by roughly 20% since the mid-2000s, as banks have exited less profitable or higher-risk corridors.

What is emerging instead is not a single upgraded system, but a patchwork of competing rails that are faster and more digital, but increasingly divergent.

Governments, central banks, FinTech firms and global institutions are all attempting to modernize the infrastructure simultaneously. The result is not emerging as a clean transition from old to new, but as a far more complex outcome: a global payments system potentially being rebuilt in parallel, without a single unifying blueprint.

Read more: Banks Make Their Move in Cross-Border Payments 

Innovation Without Convergence

The prevailing narrative around cross-border payments modernization has long centered on disruption and the idea that new technologies such as blockchain, real-time payment rails or digital currencies could displace legacy systems. But the emerging reality is more nuanced. Innovation is abundant, yet convergence is elusive.

After all, payment corridors differ dramatically in volume, infrastructure and institutional capacity. What works for high-volume routes between advanced economies may be economically unviable in smaller or less developed markets. Lower transaction volumes, limited capital access and weaker infrastructure can create structural barriers that no single technological solution may be able to fully overcome.

The United States, Brazil, India and the eurozone, among others, have each developed their own domestic fast-payment infrastructures, tailored to local regulatory environments and market needs. These systems have delivered meaningful improvements within national borders, enabling near-instant settlement and lower costs, but cross-border functionality remains limited.

Linking these systems across jurisdictions can introduce layers of complexity around differing standards, regulatory requirements, liquidity management constraints and foreign exchange considerations.

The Federal Reserve’s proposal to expand the FedNow® Service into cross-border use cases introduces one such approach. The plan would allow U.S. banks to use intermediaries, including correspondent banks, to complete the international portion of a transaction.

Still, geopolitics adds a further layer of complexity. Payments infrastructure has become a strategic asset, tied to questions of sovereignty and economic influence. Countries are increasingly motivated to reduce dependence on foreign-controlled systems and to build or support alternative networks. This dynamic risks reinforcing fragmentation, as competing blocs develop parallel infrastructures rather than integrating existing ones.

See also: How CFOs Are Turning B2B Payments Into a Strategic Weapon 

Interoperability as the Central Challenge

If fragmentation is the defining feature of the current moment, interoperability is its central challenge. The ability of different systems to communicate, exchange data and settle transactions efficiently across borders will determine whether modernization efforts ultimately succeed.

After all, despite the surge of innovation, legacy systems remain deeply embedded in the global financial architecture. Networks such as SWIFT continue to play a central role in facilitating cross-border transactions, particularly for high-value payments and institutional flows.

Rather than being displaced, these systems are evolving. Incremental upgrades, enhanced messaging capabilities and integration with newer technologies are extending their relevance. At the same time, they provide a degree of stability and trust that newer entrants have yet to fully replicate.

Central banks, international organizations and regulatory bodies have recognized the need for coordinated action, as evidenced by initiatives led by the G20 and other forums.

These efforts have focused on setting targets for cost, speed, transparency and access, as well as promoting standardization and interoperability. Progress has been made, but it remains uneven. Translating high-level commitments into practical, globally consistent implementation is inherently difficult.

“Globally, broader interoperability must be a key priority,” Emanuela Saccarola, Citi’s head of cross-border payments, services, told PYMNTS in an earlier interview, noting that the race now is to provide access to these systems from a cross-border perspective so that payments providers can connect those domestic systems into a global grid, one that can operate around the clock.

In that sense, the central question is not who will build the next generation of payments infrastructure, but who will connect it.

Moving money across borders still means navigating a patchwork of correspondent banks, local clearing systems and compliance checks that slow transactions, inflate costs and introduce uncertainty to every step.

The demand for improvement is already there. PYMNTS Intelligence data indicate that 14%  of U.S. consumers made cross-border payments in the past year and 63% of those users turned to digital wallets to do it. Yet small businesses remain stuck. One in 3 cite the lack of an industry standard as a reason for avoiding those tools, pointing directly to a lack of interoperability as the core barrier.

Bank-FinTech Partnerships Fill Gaps

Separate PYMNTS reporting has consistently shown banks relying on FinTech partners to extend reach across borders, particularly in disbursements, remittances and B2B payments.  Those partnerships are built around access: FinTechs provide connections to local payout networks, while banks provide balance sheet, compliance oversight and customer relationships.

The arrangement reflects the limits of existing infrastructure. Cross-border payments still depend on stitching together domestic systems that were not designed to communicate with one another in real time. FinTechs have addressed that gap by building orchestration layers that route payments across networks and jurisdictions.

That model remains in place even as central banks extend their reach.

The Federal Reserve’s proposal to expand FedNow into cross-border use cases introduces one such approach. The plan would allow U.S. banks to use intermediaries, including correspondent banks, to complete the international portion of a transaction.  The change would allow banks to settle the domestic leg through FedNow while relying on intermediaries for the cross-border component. This does not remove correspondent banking from the process. But it would compress the timeline and introduces real-time capabilities into part of the transaction flow.

Tokenization Aims to Redesign Settlement

Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements and several central banks, takes  different view. The initiative is examining how tokenized central bank money and commercial bank deposits can operate on programmable platforms to support cross-border payments.

The design focuses on reducing duplication. Today, cross-border payments require multiple institutions to perform similar compliance checks and reconcile separate ledgers. A shared infrastructure with programmable features could allow those steps to occur once, within a unified framework.

The project also highlights the structural issues central banks are attempting to address: different operating hours, legal regimes and technical standards that complicate even straightforward transactions.

Interoperability Remains the Constraint

The PYMNTS Intelligence data points to the same conclusion. Concerns about compatibility and standards continue to limit broader participation.

The same constraint applies to central bank initiatives. Real-time rails and tokenized platforms cannot operate in isolation. They must connect with existing bank systems, FinTech networks and international payment corridors.

Bank-FinTech partnerships remain relevant in this environment. Even as central banks build new infrastructure, those partnerships provide the integration layer that allows payments to move across jurisdictions.

Competition Shifts to Infrastructure

Central banks are not replacing private networks in the near term. Card schemes, correspondent banks and FinTech platforms still provide global reach and established connectivity.

What is changing is the point of control. By extending domestic systems such as FedNow and exploring shared platforms through projects like Agorá, central banks are positioning national and regional infrastructure as the foundation for cross-border payments.

For banks and FinTechs, instead of building entirely separate cross-border networks, they may increasingly connect into central bank-led systems while continuing to provide the services that make those connections usable: routing, compliance, liquidity management and customer interfaces.

In a trading update Monday (April 13), the company says those transactions jumped 26% during its fourth quarter to 49.4 billion pounds ($66.2 billion) and 11.3 million active customers.

“We are making good progress on building the network for the world’s money. Our infrastructure makes cross-border transactions cheaper and faster and, in January, we became one of the first payment institutions to be granted membership to Payments Canada, paving the way to direct access there,” Wise Co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann said in the update.

“More and more people are using Wise at home or abroad for their everyday spending, for paying bills, for savings and investments. That’s why last month we formally launched our UK current account with a physical branch concept on Oxford Street in London.”

The company introduced the current account late last month, framing it as a challenge to Great Britain’s retail banking industry.

“Banks haven’t kept pace with what customers expect for their current account. People shouldn’t need separate accounts for home and abroad,” Nilan Peiris, Wise’s chief product officer, said in a news release at the time.

“With the Wise Current Account, we’re giving customers a smarter way to manage their daily financial needs.”

In its Monday update, Wise also reported “continued diversification of income” through its Wise account, with customer holdings growing 37% to 29.4 billion pounds ($39 billion), and card and other revenue up 29% year over year.

In addition, the number of Wise Business active customers climbed by 26% during the quarter to 572,000, with volumes up 35%.

The company says it is also on track to complete its dual listing, with the Nasdaq becoming its primary listing, on May 11.

“We believe that the addition of a primary US listing would bring a number of strategic and capital markets benefits to Wise and its owners, including greater visibility in the United States, the biggest market opportunity for our products today, and better access to the world’s deepest and most liquid capital market,” the update added.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that 14% of American consumers had made a cross-border payment in the prior 12 months — and close to two-thirds of those consumers used digital wallets to do so.

“In this environment, competitive advantage is shifting,” PYMNTS wrote recently. “It is no longer defined by ownership of a specific payment rail, but by the ability to orchestrate transactions across multiple systems by routing value seamlessly while managing liquidity, compliance and user experience.”

This would mark a change from the current rules, in which a transfer of funds sent through the FedNow Service can include only two U.S. banks, the Fed said in a Wednesday press release.

“This additional flexibility would support new private sector use cases for the FedNow Service,” the Fed said in the release. “For example, it would allow U.S. banks to use FedNow to transact with correspondent banks to facilitate the international portion of a cross-border payment.”

The Fed invited public comment on the proposed rule and will accept comments for 60 days after the proposal’s publication in the Federal Register, according to the release.

The proposal was unanimously approved by the Federal Reserve Board in a Tuesday (April 7) board vote.

In a board memo on the proposal, Fed staff wrote that when the Board announced details of the FedNow Service in 2020, it said that the service would initially only support domestic instant payments to ensure a timely launch but that the Board would consider adding cross-border payment capabilities at a later date.

“Since the launch of FedNow, participants have expressed interest in using the service to initiate or receive cross-border instant payments as a means of improving the speed and efficiency of cross-board payments,” Fed staff wrote in the memo.

The FedNow Service was launched in July 2023 as a nationwide payments infrastructure that facilitates instant payment capabilities. At the time, it was the first new nationwide payments infrastructure to be implemented in about 40 years.

Feedback from the industry guides the priorities of the FedNow Service, Chief FedNow Executive Nick Stanescu told PYMNTS in an interview posted in November.

That collaboration began before the service’s launch in 2023 with pilot programs and advisory boards and has continued through quarterly town halls and direct consultations.

“We’re going to see more participants, more volume, more new features and functionality, and more innovation,” Stanescu said. Instant payments, he added, are “the new normal in money movement.”

The company’s Series A round, announced Tuesday (March 31), comes as it works to use stablecoins for faster cross-border transactions.

Writing on the company blog, Founder and CEO Prabhakar Reddy compared the company’s work to that of Anthropic. Before that artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s Claude model, he argued, companies had to build and train their own models and manage their own infrastructure.

“We’re building the equivalent for global financial infrastructure. We are the pipes through which all global FX will flow,” he said. “The remittance company in Brazil, the neobank in Singapore, the payroll processor in Dubai – none of them should have to rebuild what we’ve built. They should just use it.”

Tuesday’s announcement comes a little less than a year after OpenFX emerged from stealth with $23 million in new funding.

The company did not reveal a valuation associated with this newest round, but a source familiar with the matter put that figure at $500 million in an interview with Reuters.

Reddy described growing up in Dubai during the 1990s and 2000s and seeing lines stretch outside Western Union branches as workers from overseas sent money back home. When he returned in 2022 after years in the Bay Area, the lines were still there.

“People still pay 5-7% of their paychecks to send money home. Money that might have otherwise gone towards building a better life,” he wrote. “Thirty years later, on the other side of a technological revolution that put supercomputers in everyone’s pocket – almost nothing had changed. That gap is where OpenFX began.”

The goal, he said, was to show that “stablecoins could do for money what the internet did for information,” moving the value of fiat payments across borders in seconds.

Writing about the cross-border payment space earlier this month, PYMNTS noted that stablecoins still accounted for a small portion of international transactions. Meanwhile, many of the benefits associated with these tokens—like speed, lower costs and flexibility—are now being provided by the existing financial system.

“They are being delivered in a way that is integrated with regulatory frameworks, banking relationships and enterprise workflows,” that report said. “In other words, the transformation of cross-border payments is not waiting for a new system to replace the old one. It is happening within the system itself.”

But a fourth dimension is increasingly reshaping the terrain: data.

Unlike containers or currencies, data does not simply cross borders; it collides with them. Governments increasingly view data as a strategic asset, akin to energy or defense infrastructure. Payment firms, banks and financial services platforms are also adopting that view.

Today’s global economy operates relatively continuously. eCommerce platforms, digital marketplaces and distributed supply chains generate transactions around the clock. Data moves instantly; capital, however, often lags. For finance leaders, this mismatch is becoming a headache.

Cross-border payments, once the domain of correspondent banking relationships and foreign exchange spreads, now depend on the seamless flow of information: transaction data, identity verification, fraud signals and compliance metadata. When that data is constrained, delayed or localized, the efficiency gains of next-generation payments infrastructure begin to erode.

The result may be a new kind of bottleneck in the global financial system. While payment rails have become faster and more efficient, the data that supports them is encountering friction at every border.

Read more: Banks Make Their Move in Cross-Border Payments 

The New Architecture of International Payments

The first phase of payments innovation focused on speed at the domestic level. Real-time payment systems, mobile wallets and QR-based transactions have transformed consumer expectations in markets from India to Singapore.

The next phase is about stitching these systems together.

For decades, cross-border transactions relied on correspondent banking networks, batch processing and settlement cycles constrained by time zones and legacy infrastructure. Payment infrastructure tended to function as discrete “rails,” each owned and operated by individual institutions or national systems. That system worked well enough when trade moved at the pace of paper and predictable schedules. Real-time digital interactions threaten to break that system.

Today, the model is shifting toward interconnected networks. Bilateral linkages between domestic real-time systems, such as those connecting Southeast Asian economies, are early examples of this transition, enabling cross-border transfers using something as simple as a mobile number.

Findings in the report “Global Money Movement: U.S. Edition,” done in collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Terrapay, showed that 14% of U.S. consumers had made a cross-border payment in the previous 12 months—and nearly two-thirds of those consumers used digital wallets to do so.

In this environment, competitive advantage is shifting. It is no longer defined by ownership of a specific payment rail, but by the ability to orchestrate transactions across multiple systems by routing value seamlessly while managing liquidity, compliance and user experience.

“Imagine sending money from here to Uruguay,” Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman told PYMNTS in an interview published in June. “You open your Venmo, type in the amount, and your friend receives it via Pix in Brazil. You never leave your app. That’s where we’re going.”

“There are advantages in instant settlement,” Gertman added. “You don’t need as much working capital. You’re not exposed to FX gain/loss.”

See also: How Payments Automation Helps CFOs Keep Up With Their Own Data

Cross-Border Payments Move From Rails to Networks

Rather than the final step in a transaction, payments are becoming the synchronization layer between financial flows, operational data and decision-making systems. A payment that settles instantly but requires manual reconciliation later does not reduce friction; it merely relocates it.

After all, faster payments introduce new risks around fraud, compliance failures and systemic vulnerabilities that can propagate in real time. As a result, trust is becoming an embedded feature of payments architecture rather than a downstream control.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed for real-time fraud detection, anomaly identification and transaction screening. Verification is no longer a checkpoint that slows the process; it is integrated into the flow itself.

The most advanced systems therefore aim to align the movement of money with the movement of information, ensuring that liquidity, risk and data travel together.

Beyond compliance, however, data governance is becoming a geopolitical issue. Trade negotiations can now routinely include provisions on digital trade and data flows. Regional alliances are forming around shared regulatory principles, while tensions between major economies are shaping the rules of the game.

Understanding the trajectory of data regulation is becoming as important as tracking currency fluctuations or interest rates. Scenario planning must now account for regulatory divergence and potential fragmentation of the digital economy.

What ultimately distinguishes the new architecture of international payments is not any single technology, but the convergence of multiple forces: real-time processing, network interoperability, embedded trust and programmable value.

Together, these elements are reshaping the operating model of global finance. Payments are no longer a standalone function; they are becoming a strategic layer that connects liquidity, data and economic activity in real time.

The company told Coindesk Wednesday (March 25) that it is taking part in BLOOM, a Monetary Authority of Singapore program aimed at extending settlement capabilities for tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins.

The plan involves Ripple working with Unloq, a supply chain finance technology provider, to test a system where cross-border trade payments using Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin are released automatically when certain conditions are met, such as shipment verification, the report added.

Trade finance, Coindesk noted, has traditionally relied on layers of manual verification, documentary credits and correspondent banking relationships that might take days—if not weeks—to settle.

And as covered here recently, this situation has only been made worse by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“For vessels that would normally call at Gulf ports or transit nearby waters, the calculus now includes the possibility of missile strikes, drone attacks or naval confrontation,” PYMNTS wrote. “For global container logistics, the shift has a cascading effect. When ships alter routes or cancel port calls, the delicate choreography of container repositioning breaks down.”

Ripple and Unloq’s pilot, the Coindesk report added, employs Unloq’s SC+ platform to combine trade obligations, settlement conditions and financing workflows into one execution layer, with RLUSD on the XRP Ledger taking care of money movement.

As PYMNTS wrote last week, stablecoins have essentially been able to build their reputation just on their promise to provide cross-border settlement innovations. At the time, PayPal had just expanded the availability of its dollar-backed stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD) and now offers it in 70 markets around the world.

However, stablecoin flows account for an “infinitesimally small” share of cross-border payment volume. Payments coming from Latin America and Africa, two supposed digital asset hot spots, each make up less than $1 billion. Stablecoin payment activity today is fueled almost solely by payments sent from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, according to McKinsey data.

“Beneath the headline crypto noise, however, a more powerful, real-world transformation has been unfolding,” that report added.

“Traditional payment rails, long criticized for being slow, opaque and expensive, are undergoing a structural upgrade. Three main advances are driving change: real-time rails are expanding globally, FX costs are shrinking and APIs are turning payments into software and streamlining local and multicurrency collections.”

Stablecoins, after all, have been able to basically make their name on just their promise alone to innovate and disrupt the cross-border settlement space. As recently as Tuesday (March 17), PayPal expanded the availability of its dollar-backed stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD) and now offers it in 70 markets worldwide.

But stablecoin flows represent an infinitesimally small portion of cross-border payment volume. Payments originating from Latin America and Africa, two supposed digital asset hot spots, each account for less than $1 billion. Stablecoin payment activity today is driven almost entirely by payments sent from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, per McKinsey.

Beneath the headline crypto noise, however, a more powerful, real-world transformation has been unfolding. Traditional payment rails, long criticized for being slow, opaque and expensive, are undergoing a structural upgrade.

Three main advances are driving change: real-time rails are expanding globally, FX costs are shrinking and APIs are turning payments into software and streamlining local and multicurrency collections.

And unlike many crypto-native experiments, these changes are already delivering measurable impact at scale. The news Wednesday (March 18) that J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard have launched a new virtual card in Europe, for example, is likely to drive far greater actual cross-border volume than any stablecoin expansion could.

Read more: Trade Disruptions Tie Up Cash and Test CFO Playbooks 

Why Stablecoins Aren’t the Main Story

The broader story is that many of the benefits associated with stablecoins, such as speed, lower costs and flexibility, are now being delivered within the existing financial system. They are being delivered in a way that is integrated with regulatory frameworks, banking relationships and enterprise workflows.

In other words, the transformation of cross-border payments is not waiting for a new system to replace the old one. It is happening within the system itself.

While cross-border payments have been constrained by the limitations of domestic systems, that divide is now closing. Real-time payment networks are proliferating rapidly across major economies, from Europe to Southeast Asia to Latin America.

More importantly, interoperability between these systems is improving. Bilateral and multilateral linkages are enabling funds to move directly between countries without defaulting to legacy correspondent banking chains.

And if speed has been the most visible pain point in cross-border payments, cost has been the most persistent. Foreign exchange spreads, intermediary fees and hidden markups have long made international transactions expensive and unpredictable.

But advances in treasury technology are enabling businesses to manage currency exposure more proactively, reducing the need for costly last-minute conversions. At the same time, a combination of increased competition, better pricing data and more efficient liquidity management is driving FX costs downward.

Perhaps most importantly, payment providers are rethinking how FX is integrated into the transaction flow. Instead of treating currency conversion as a separate, opaque step, it is increasingly embedded into the payment process itself, with real-time pricing and clear disclosures.

See also: B2B’s Biggest Innovation Isn’t Technology. It’s the Buying Experience 

Payments Are Becoming Software

The third, and perhaps most transformative driver of change, is the rise of API-driven payment infrastructure. In the past, integrating with cross-border payment systems required significant manual effort, custom integrations and ongoing operational overhead. Payments were something businesses executed, not something they could easily embed into their products or workflows.

With APIs, however, instead of building separate processes for each market, companies can create unified payment experiences that adapt dynamically to local requirements. Collecting funds in multiple currencies, reconciling transactions and routing payments through the most efficient corridors can all be automated.

“There are expectations both on buyer sides and supplier sides for things to become a little bit more digital and automated,” Rene Stynen, senior vice president, EMEA, B2B Payments at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS in an interview this month.

“Embedded payments, where the payment becomes invisible in the procure-to-pay process, is what everyone wants,” Stynen added. “You don’t want the payment as a separate step.”

A company can, for example, accept payments in local currencies from customers around the world, hold those funds in multi-currency accounts, and disburse them to suppliers or partners without unnecessary conversions. The result is a more efficient flow of funds and a better experience for all parties involved.

For global businesses, this shift opens up new possibilities. Entering new markets becomes less about navigating complex payment infrastructures and more about executing a coherent go-to-market strategy. Managing suppliers and partners across borders becomes more predictable and less resource-intensive. And delivering a consistent customer experience becomes achievable, even in highly fragmented markets.

For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.

“Powered by new product capabilities and accelerating customer adoption, Ripple is now the only solution in the region capable of serving institutions across the full spectrum of financial needs — from cross-border payments and digital asset custody to prime brokerage and treasury management,” the company announced Tuesday (March 17).

In addition, Ripple said it plans to seek a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license with Brazil’s central bank, in line with the country’s new virtual asset regulatory framework.

“Latin America has always been a priority market for Ripple — not just because of the scale of the opportunity, but because Brazil has built one of the most advanced and forward-thinking financial ecosystems in the world,” said Monica Long, Ripple’s president, said in a news release.

“We’ve spent more than a decade building the trust, licensing, and technology required to operate in regulated markets,” Long added. “Now, with our expanded platform, we can meet institutions across the region with everything they need to compete in the modern financial system.”

The release added that a number of FinTechs and financial institutions in Brazil are utilizing Ripple for their real-world liquidity and payments needs.

For example, Braza Bank has chosen Ripple Payments to streamline USD payments and issued its BRL-pegged stablecoin, BBRL on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). And payments firm Attrus is using Ripple for cross-border payments in Brazil and over-the-counter settlement, integrating Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin into its settlement framework.

Meanwhile, Ripple said its custody business is also expanding into Brazil, “bringing bank-grade security, real-time compliance controls, and flexible deployment options to regulated institutions in the region.”

With these measures, Ripple is venturing into a FinTech ecosystem that—as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year—“remains defined by steady financial innovation, backed by renewed funding flows into the region, especially via venture capital.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Digital Developments: Charting Digital Payment Growth in Latin America” found that digital wallets, account-to-account transfers and real-time payment systems are displacing cash, modernizing commerce and expanding access to formal financial services in the region.

Ripple is also looking to expand into other geographic areas. The company announced last month it had received full approval for an electronic money institution (EMI) license from Luxembourg’s financial regulator.

The company said this marked a significant expansion of its regulatory footprint and would speed the deployment of its payment services across the European Union.

Ripple also plans to scale its payments business in the U.K. after getting an EMI license and approved crypto asset registration from the country’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Andrew Bailey, who leads the risk watchdog, said in a speech Thursday (March 12) that governments need to move forward with reforms to their international and domestic payment systems or risk inefficiencies that could fragment the world financial landscape.

“We have some tough challenges ahead,” said Bailey, whose comments at an FSB payments summit were reported by Reuters.

He told the audience that progress has been achieved under a G20-backed roadmap on international payments but implementation was still uneven.

As Reuters noted, cross-border payments have faced criticism over their high costs and slower settlement times, especially when compared with domestic payment rails.

The FSB said in October that world governments were on track to fall short of a 2027 goal of reducing the average cost of cross-border retail payments to no more than 1% and for 75% of wholesale and for retail payments to be credited within one hour of being made.

“Despite a flurry of policy breakthroughs and technical milestones, the world’s payment systems remain fragmented, with persistent frictions that make transferring money across borders costly and slow,” PYMNTS wrote last year of the FSB review. “The ultimate verdict? Technology alone is unlikely to solve the problem. New payment networks are emerging, but interoperability remains elusive. Structural barriers, including legal, regulatory and supervisory bottlenecks, continue to slow implementation.”

During Thursday’s speech, Bailey announced work toward a 2027 review of FSB recommendations on data frameworks and supervision, the Reuters report added.

Reuters also pointed out that efforts to overhaul global payments are happening as the cryptocurrency sector is lobbying for more business-friendly regulation of stablecoins, which advocates say provide for faster, cheaper, cross-border transactions.

Regulators, however, have warned that these tokens could threaten financial stability, consumer protection and monetary sovereignty if not supervised properly, the report added.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last month that—even as global trade faces a period of volatility—the “global payment options supporting cross-border commerce have never been more advanced and innovative.”

While FinTechs have redefined speed and usability, opening up new corridors, pricing models and APIs, banks are re-configuring their global plumbing and modernizing the settlement, compliance and liquidity infrastructure that still upholds most international flows.

“The corporate strategies supporting today’s cross-border environment are becoming increasingly complex and sensitive,” the report added.

“Companies are expanding internationally not just to grow, but to diversify risk. Treasury teams care less about marginal fee reductions and more about predictability, or knowing when money will arrive, in what currency, and under which regulatory conditions.”