Nurabal and instant, A2A payments advisory and events | industry interview

In an interview for The Paypers, Catrine Rhenberg, Partner at Nurabal, shares the company’s history with instant, A2A payments and presents the Leadership Pulse Series, an expert roundtable focused on the biggest developments of this industry. 

What is the story of Nurabal and the Leadership Pulse Series? Why instant, account-to-account (A2A) payments?

After a somewhat slow start in the mid-2000s, instant payments have been growing rapidly in the last few years, and domestic schemes have become real infrastructures. Consumer adoption has increased exponentially worldwide, and new regulation is also in place. In the space of a few years, instant A2A rails reached the mainstream, and now is the time for true global expansion. 

Nurabal was founded by senior payments professionals who spent their careers active in this industry. They were part of it, noticing what worked and where fundamental issues persisted, and founded Nurabal with a specific purpose: to help make instant payments truly operational across borders, by providing the strategic and technical expertise that institutions need, and by actively contributing to the strategic overview, developing the right connections, and the international coordination that the industry still lacks. Nurabal provides strategic advisory services in cross-border connectivity, rulebooks, governance for central and commercial banks, A2A schemes, and many more. 

The Leadership Pulse Series is a result of the expertise accumulated by Nurabal advisors, put at the service of the industry. It operates as an independent event and organisation, hosting some of the most important conversations around instant payments today. 

A2A is the focus of Nurabal and the Leadership Pulse Series because this is where the structural shift in payments is currently happening. While cards solved the problem of the last generation, A2A rails are a significant part of the next generation of payment infrastructure and what it is being built on. That is where our work belongs. 

How is your approach to industry collaboration through the Leadership Pulse Series events different to other initiatives?

Most industry events are built for visibility, while The Leadership Pulse Series is built for substance, as attendance is by invitation and approval only, and the group is kept small on purpose. Large conferences produce presentations. Small, curated rooms produce honest conversations. 

The second difference is that we are not neutral organisers; we are part of the industry. We bring practitioners together around problems we are actively working on ourselves. Many event organisers are foreign to the business. We are not. This approach means that participants are not sitting through panels and instead, they are in the room with people who have built systems, navigated regulations, and negotiated interoperability agreements. The format is structured enough to produce outputs and open enough to follow the expertise in the room, from top strategic overviews to specific aspects, such as compliance, governance, agentic AI, and more. The reason experts come to our events is that we provide a forum for real interaction and participation, not passive attendance. 

What did the first edition focus on, and how has the A2A payment industry progressed since then?

The first edition took place in Stockholm in May 2025. The focus was European: SEPA Instant, mandatory adoption, and the domestic schemes shaping what a mature A2A ecosystem looks like – Swish, Vipps MobilePay, BLIK. The conversations were grounded because we were in a market where this was already live infrastructure, not aspiration. 

What has shifted since Stockholm is the scope of the problem. The operative question in 2025 was European readiness. By 2026, the harder question is connectivity, global connectivity. How do you link a scheme in Norway to a corridor in Turkey, or a rail in the Gulf to a merchant network in West Africa, without recreating the correspondent banking complexity that instant payments were meant to replace? 

That shift is reflected in the Madrid edition. The attendees and speakers represent a broader geography by design, as true global interoperability cannot be built from inside a single region alone. 

Which are the biggest unanticipated opportunities for A2A payments, and where is the biggest risk?

Two opportunities have been larger than most expected. 

The first is merchant acceptance in emerging markets. The assumption was that acceptance infrastructure would follow consumer adoption slowly and at high cost. In practice, instant rails are enabling interoperable merchant acceptance that bypasses card terminal networks entirely. For a country building its payment stack from scratch, that is a significant shortcut. 

The second is payment resilience as a strategic argument. Geopolitical risk has moved up the agenda for central banks and finance ministries, and in some geographies, such as Europe, it has become critical. Domestic instant payment infrastructure is now part of a payments sovereignty conversation, not just an efficiency one, unlocking political will in previously slow-to-move markets 

Despite these developments, the biggest risk is fragmentation. Every corridor, bilateral deal, and regional scheme is producing its own interoperability framework. The danger is a world of connected silos, where the cost of navigating between schemes recreates the exact problem instant payments were meant to solve. The standards work at the BIS and EPI levels is necessary, yet it is not progressing as fast as scheme proliferation. 

What is in store in June for the selected event participants, and what are your hopes for instant payments?

On 10 June in Madrid, we are bringing together a selected group from across the instant payments ecosystem. Scheme operators, including BLIK, Vipps MobilePay, Bizum, and Alipay+, will be in the room alongside central banks (such as the Banco de España), infrastructure providers, and fintechs. The themes are cross-border interoperability, payment resilience, agentic payments tailored for instant payments, and what the next layer of instant payments infrastructure should look like. We will also have a look at how CBDCs will interact with A2A payments. 

As for hopes? The goal is straightforward: a payment between a consumer in Casablanca, a merchant in Madrid, and a treasury in Mexico City should settle with the same certainty and at the same time as a domestic transfer. The infrastructure for that is currently being built in pieces, across many jurisdictions. The question is whether the people doing this converge on shared standards before incompatible architectures get locked in. That is what June is for. 

For The Paypers’ community

Leadership Pulse Series is complimentary for all approved participants. As a reader of The Paypers, you are arriving through an editorial community we trust. Submit your application here, and your profile will be reviewed with that context in mind. 

About the author

Catrine Rhenberg is a payments expert and Partner at Nurabal, advising banks and fintechs on RTP solutions, cross-border transfers, and more. She previously held senior roles at PayPal and Trustly, among others, leading partnerships and ecosystem initiatives across Europe and beyond. Drawing on years of hands-on experience in digital payments, Catrine helps clients turn complex payment challenges into simple, reliable experiences for consumers and businesses in multiple markets. 

 

About Nurabal

Nurabal is a niche payments consulting firm specialising in RTP schemes and cross-border instant payment connectivity. Headquartered in Singapore, Nurabal partners with global banks, fintechs, and payment infrastructures to design, optimise, and scale RTP-enabled propositions. With deep scheme and market expertise, Nurabal helps clients navigate technical interoperability, liquidity, and operating models to unlock new value from instant payments across multiple regions and use cases.