Global finance is becoming multi-asset. Its infrastructure must catch up

Gabriel J. Pan, VP, Global Head of Partnerships at PhotonPay, explains why multi-asset finance depends on interoperability, with liquidity linking bank money, cards, and stablecoins.

For the past decade, the expansion of global payment infrastructure has largely been about connecting more networks, adding a bank or local clearing partner for each new market, and a new route for each new currency. This model drove much of the industry's progress and made cross-border money movement more digital and more real-time than ever before.

But the infrastructure challenge is now changing. Besides more markets and more payment rails, businesses are now managing different forms of value at the same time. Commercial bank money, balances held through real-time payment systems, card-based payment flows, stablecoins, and, over time, other forms of tokenised assets are beginning to coexist within the same treasury environment. A global business may hold SGD in Singapore, manage USD in the United States, make local payments in Europe, use commercial cards for procurement, and use stablecoins in selected scenarios to improve settlement efficiency. From the customer's perspective, these five should function as different forms of value and different transmission paths within one global financial operating system.

Global finance is moving beyond a model defined primarily by multi-rail connectivity toward a multi-asset architecture. By multi-asset, I mean a treasury in which commercial bank money, real-time payment balances, card flows, and stablecoins are held and moved through one operating layer. The critical question for the next phase is no longer how many rails we can connect, but whether value can move safely and efficiently across different assets, institutions, networks, and markets. In other words, the defining capability of future financial infrastructure will be interoperability.

How banks and digital networks fit together

Industry discussions about new financial infrastructure often fall into binary narratives: banks or blockchain, fiat or stablecoins, traditional clearing systems or digital settlement networks. But global commerce does not evolve through binary choices. Businesses will not leave the existing financial system simply because a new technology becomes available. Bank accounts, local clearing, foreign exchange (FX), credit, safeguarding, compliance, and mature liquidity infrastructure remain essential to how global commerce functions.

At the same time, stablecoins and other digital forms of value introduce new capabilities, including greater programmability, more continuous availability, and new approaches to settlement and liquidity management. The extent to which these capabilities translate into faster end-to-end settlement still depends on the underlying financial networks, liquidity arrangements, and local payment infrastructure. The real opportunity to combine their strengths into a more effective financial architecture. Historically, banks have often been seen primarily as account providers and payment channels. In the future, they will increasingly act as liquidity anchors and regulated settlement layers within a broader multi-asset financial network, while payment infrastructure providers take on more responsibility for connectivity, orchestration, and abstraction. 

Liquidity is the real interoperability problem

In payments, ‘interoperability’ is sometimes reduced to technical connectivity. Two systems being able to communicate through APIs does not mean value can move efficiently between them. Technical connectivity is only the first layer. The harder problem has always been liquidity.

When value needs to move across markets, currencies, and increasingly across asset types, the usability of a route depends on the liquidity structure behind it. That structure comes down to a set of practical questions:

• Where is the money held, and in what form? 
• When is it available? 
• Where does FX occur? 
• How is settlement finality defined? 
• How is liquidity managed across weekends and holidays? 
• If a route fails, how is value rerouted? 
• How are compliance, reconciliation, and exception-handling responsibilities divided across institutions? 

Only when these questions are resolved does a payment rail become commercially scalable.

Interoperability without liquidity is only connectivity. For global financial institutions and payment infrastructure providers, future partnerships will therefore need to go deeper than adding bilateral connections. They will increasingly require coordination across liquidity, FX, settlement, risk, compliance, and reconciliation.

How payment orchestration chooses the route

As the number of asset types continues to grow, another requirement naturally emerges: who decides which route value should take? Finance teams should not have to decide every day whether a transaction should move through correspondent banking, a domestic real-time payment network, or a stablecoin settlement route. Nor should they have to continuously compare the cost, speed, liquidity, and risk profile of every underlying asset. Increasingly, those decisions should be made by infrastructure.

I expect a more sophisticated orchestration layer will become critical in a multi-asset world. It will need to understand payment conditions across markets, the liquidity characteristics of different assets, FX, and settlement dynamics, as well as the commercial purpose and risk requirements of each transaction. It should be able to evaluate routes against cost, speed, and fund availability while respecting applicable compliance requirements and the business's own authorisation rules. For businesses, the experience should remain simple: move value from here to there. Which bank, network, or asset ultimately carries that value should increasingly become an infrastructure decision. For context, around 97% of PhotonPay's payouts land the same day or within hours, and 68% settle in real time.

Building a network of networks

If the future of global finance is both multi-rail and multi-asset, then it is unlikely to be dominated by a single institution, asset, or network. Global finance is inherently shaped by differences in geography, regulation, liquidity, and commercial use cases. Different markets will continue to rely on different banking systems, payment networks, and settlement mechanisms, while multiple forms of value will continue to coexist.

What needs to be built is a network of networks that allows different systems to work together effectively.

Within that architecture, banking networks need to work with real-time payment systems, card networks with account-based infrastructure, and fiat systems with stablecoins and future forms of tokenised value. The roles of different participants also become clearer. Tier-1 banks provide regulated balance sheets, liquidity, and institutional trust. Payment networks provide reach and rule frameworks. Liquidity providers support transferability across markets and assets. Payment infrastructure platforms such as PhotonPay need to abstract those underlying capabilities into global financial services that businesses can actually use.

The nature of partnership between financial institutions will also change. We are collectively defining a new layer of digital financial infrastructure: how value moves across assets, how liquidity is coordinated across networks, how compliance and data remain continuous across systems, and how businesses can access these capabilities without having to understand all the complexity underneath.

For financial institutions, this is both a technology challenge and an ecosystem challenge. No single bank, payment network, stablecoin issuer, liquidity provider, or fintech can build the complete answer alone. The most valuable infrastructure will come from deeper collaboration across the ecosystem and from jointly defining new standards for connectivity.

If the task of the past decade was to give the world more payment rails, the task of the next decade will be to make those rails and assets work together.

The future of global finance will not be defined by which network wins. It will be defined by how well different networks, assets, and institutions work together.

About the company

Founded in Hong Kong in 2015, PhotonPay is a global fintech company building a next-generation, stablecoin-centric Financial Operating System (Financial OS). Its API-first architecture brings together multi-asset wallets supporting stablecoins and fiat currencies, global money movement, foreign exchange, global card issuing, embedded finance, and local clearing infrastructure, connecting digital and traditional financial rails within an integrated financial system.

In October 2026, PhotonPay announced a USD 40 million Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from new investor SBI Group and follow-on investments from existing investors IDG Capital, GL Ventures, and Lightspeed Faction.