The future of cross-border payments: banks, technology, and financial participation

Joanne Strobel-Cort from BNY explains how banks, technology, and interoperability can move financial services beyond access and inclusion toward meaningful participation through greater financial connectivity.

What role do banks play in the digital payments ecosystem today, and how might that role evolve in the future?

Banks continue to play a foundational role in the digital payments ecosystem because they provide the trust, regulated infrastructure, liquidity, governance, and risk management that allow money to move securely at scale. Cross-border payments must navigate different currencies, regulatory regimes, market infrastructures, and compliance requirements. Even as new payment providers, wallets, and digital-asset networks enter the market, the need for trusted intermediation does not disappear. Rather, banks’ role evolves from processing transactions on a single rail to connecting, governing, and orchestrating activity across multiple rails and providers.

The future is therefore less about banks being replaced and more about correspondent banking being modernised. Banks can combine their institutional strengths with APIs, ISO 20022 data, real-time payment connections, and emerging regulated digital infrastructures. Their value will increasingly lie in absorbing complexity for clients, selecting the right route, supporting liquidity and compliance, and delivering an experience that is secure, predictable and simple regardless of how the payment moves behind the scenes.

What does the shift from financial inclusion to financial participation mean, and what role can banks play in that transition?

Financial inclusion is primarily about access: whether someone can reach an account, wallet, payment method or the formal financial system. Financial participation goes further. It means that people and businesses can use those services reliably, affordably, and meaningfully to receive income, make payments, manage liquidity, save, invest, and participate in local and international commerce. Access is the starting point, but participation depends on whether the service actually works in the user’s economic life.

Banks can support this shift by joining the reach and innovation of fintechs, wallets and local payment systems with regulated infrastructure, strong controls and global connectivity. This is particularly important in growth markets, where fragmented rails, inconsistent regulatory requirements, and limited cross-border connectivity can restrict competition and access even when domestic digital-payment adoption is strong. The practical objective should be to connect financial endpoints so that an account or wallet is not an isolated destination, but a reliable gateway to broader economic activity.

Financial participation should also be assessed through actual user outcomes, rather than only account ownership or system-level averages. Persistent barriers are often concentrated in the last mile, difficult corridors, local requirements, currency controls, data-sharing constraints and compliance processes. In this context, certainty and transparency can be more important to clients than speed alone. Meaningful participation therefore requires users to know when their funds will arrive, how much they will receive and what the transaction will cost.

What technologies are enabling the next generation of cross-border payments, and where do you see the biggest opportunities and challenges?

Several technologies are enabling the continued modernisation of cross-border payments. ISO 20022 provides richer and more structured payment data, supporting improved automation, interoperability, compliance processing, and exception management. APIs allow payment capabilities to be more directly embedded into client workflows, while modern payment platforms support intelligent validation, routing, enrichment and connections to domestic instant-payment systems. Together, these capabilities help reduce manual intervention and improve transparency throughout the payment lifecycle.

Always-on infrastructure is also becoming increasingly important. The move toward 24/7 processing requires payment technology to operate alongside real-time liquidity visibility, resilient operating models, and preventive fraud controls. These developments point toward a hybrid future in which traditional correspondent capabilities, domestic instant rails and regulated digital infrastructures coexist rather than being consolidated into one universal network.

Technology alone, however, will not resolve fragmentation. Legal, regulatory, and contextual interoperability must advance alongside technical connectivity. Different privacy requirements, sanctions regimes, fraud-liability frameworks, digital-identity standards, and travel-rule implementations can create friction even when systems are technically capable of exchanging payments and data.

The next phase of cross-border payments is not simply about moving money faster. It is about connecting systems, data and participants so that people and businesses can move money with greater certainty, transparency and trust. Banks have an important role to play as trusted orchestrators, combining regulated infrastructure with new technologies and partnerships to make increasingly complex payment ecosystems feel simple, accessible and useful to the end user.

How can the industry balance speed, transparency, trust, and affordability while making cross-border payments more inclusive?

The starting point is to treat speed, affordability and trust as interconnected requirements rather than competing objectives. Faster processing is valuable, but clients also need certainty of cost, payment-status visibility, reliable delivery, and confidence that appropriate controls have been applied. The goal should therefore be an end-to-end experience that reduces friction without weakening governance, resilience or financial crime controls.

In an instant and increasingly irreversible environment, controls must move upstream. Identity verification, behavioural analytics, transaction context, and risk-based decisioning need to be embedded into the payment flow before funds are released. At the same time, structured data, validation, and automation can reduce unnecessary manual intervention for legitimate transactions. This allows institutions to manage risk more precisely rather than applying broad friction to every customer or corridor.

Affordability also depends on addressing the full payment chain, including FX pricing, intermediary charges, fragmented processing, and last-mile delivery. Transparency around fees and delivery expectations enables clients to make informed choices, while intelligent routing can help select the most appropriate option based on factors such as speed, cost, reach, and certainty. The strongest client experience is not necessarily the fastest transaction, but one that arrives predictably and securely, with clear economics for both the sender and recipient.

What will it take to achieve greater interoperability and financial connectivity across markets, and turn financial access into meaningful economic participation?

Interoperability requires more than a technical connection. It depends on common messaging and data standards, compatible operating rules, clear accountability, shared identity and compliance frameworks, and sustained collaboration among banks, market infrastructures, payment networks, fintechs, wallets and public authorities. ISO 20022 and APIs are important building blocks, but they must be supported by scheme rules, commercial agreements and consistent governance if services are to work reliably across markets.

The industry should also avoid replacing existing fragmentation with new digital silos. Multiple blockchains, wallet networks, token standards, and domestic instant payment systems may expand reach, but without interoperability they can reproduce the same barriers that exist today. Common standards, portable identity, harmonised compliance protocols, and stronger cross-border regulatory coordination are therefore essential to connecting traditional and emerging forms of value. 

Finally, interoperability should be measured by practical outcomes at the corridor and user level. Industry averages can mask significant differences in difficult jurisdictions or in the final domestic leg of a payment. Progress should be evaluated based on whether users experience clear pricing, predictable delivery, full-value receipt, meaningful reach and secure access to services that help them participate in commerce. That shifts the conversation from whether systems can technically connect to whether people and businesses can actually use those connections confidently and consistently. 

From access to participation: the next chapter is taking shape. For decades, financial inclusion has focused on expanding access to bank accounts, wallets, and digital payments. The next frontier may be connectivity: ensuring that financial systems can connect, interact, and move value seamlessly across borders. As banks, wallets, payment providers, and domestic infrastructures remain fragmented across markets, the resulting friction can affect cost, speed, transparency, predictability and ultimately the ability of people and businesses to participate in the global economy. Look out for The Paypers’ upcoming report, launching alongside Sibos 2026 in Miami, exploring the economic, operational, and societal cost of financial fragmentation and examining how interoperability, connected payment networks, and greater collaboration across the financial ecosystem can help build more connected economies and enable the next era of financial participation.

About Joanne Strobel-Cort

Joanne Strobel-Cort is Head of International Payments for Global Payments & Trade, leading international payments products and distribution strategies. She partners across Global Payments & Trade and Global Sales to drive revenue growth while ensuring risk and compliance standards. With over 30 years of experience, she joined BNY in 2025 after senior roles at Wells Fargo, Citizens, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro,and Citibank, and is active in major industry councils and events.

 

About BNY

BNY is a global financial services company at the center of the world’s capital markets. For more than 240 years, it has helped clients operate efficiently and grow, serving over 90% of Fortune 100 companies and nearly all top 100 banks globally. As of June 30, 2026, BNY oversees USD 62.6 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and USD 2.2 trillion in assets under management.