Why the future of cross-border payments is interoperability, not another wallet

In many markets, domestic instant payments are now largely solved. The next frontier is connecting them, and Scan-to-Pay is becoming the layer that does it. Bogdan Zadorozhny, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at 8B, shares his perspective with The Paypers.

Real-time payments, wallets, and QR acceptance have moved from regional experiments to mainstream infrastructure. In 2023, real-time payment volume reached 266.2 billion transactions globally [1], while QR payments are forecast to keep expanding through 2030 [2]. But scale inside domestic markets does not automatically solve the harder problem: making those systems work across borders.

The next challenge is making those systems work across borders. A Thai user can pay with PromptPay at home in seconds. A Brazilian user can do the same with Pix. But put either of them in Almaty, Dubai, or Bangkok as a foreign visitor, and the experience often falls back to cards, cash, or a separate wallet download.

Over the past decade, country after country built domestic instant-payment systems that work brilliantly at home – India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, Thailand’s PromptPay, Singapore’s PayNow, Malaysia’s DuitNow, Indonesia’s QRIS. The scale is now extraordinary: India alone processed 228.3 billion UPI transactions in 2025.[3]

But each system was designed for one jurisdiction. The experience that feels seamless at home still breaks the moment a consumer travels: a QR code here, a banking app there, cards or cash everywhere else. The constraint is not consumer readiness. It is that national payment systems were never built to talk to each other.

QR is only the visible layer

To the consumer, Scan-to-Pay looks trivial: open the app, scan the code, confirm, done. Beneath that gesture sits everything that actually makes a cross-border payment work – routing, protocol translation, FX conversion, risk and fraud screening, compliance and transaction monitoring, settlement, reconciliation, and confirmation, often across two jurisdictions at once.

A QR code does not solve cross-border payments. The value is in what happens after the scan. That is why Scan-to-Pay is becoming less a payment method and more a practical interoperability layer between systems that were never designed to connect. The consumer keeps the experience they already trust; the merchant reaches international customers without integrating a dozen foreign wallets.

The market is already connecting

This is no longer theory. Through the ASEAN Payment Connectivity agenda, Southeast Asia had more than a dozen live cross-border QR linkages by 2024, connecting schemes such as PromptPay, DuitNow, PayNow, and QRIS.[4] India and Singapore went further: the UPI–PayNow linkage – the world’s first cloud-based, real-time connection of two instant-payment systems – reached 19 Indian banks and the major UPI apps in 2025.[5]

The most consequential move is at the infrastructure level. Project Nexus, incubated by the BIS and now carried forward by Nexus Global Payments, replaces bilateral deals with a single-connection model: an instant-payment system connects once to Nexus and reaches every other member. India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and now Indonesia are working toward live implementation – a first wave expected to span a combined market of roughly 1.7 billion people.[6]

The direction is becoming clearer. Cross-border innovation is no longer driven only by card networks and correspondent banking. It is increasingly being built on interoperable domestic rails. The objective is not to replace national systems. It is to connect them.

Why this matters across the value chain

For banks and wallets, interoperability is customer retention beyond the border: when customers travel, study, work, or shop abroad, their bank should not quietly forfeit those transactions to a foreign wallet or card scheme. For merchants, it collapses complexity – connect through local QR infrastructure and reach foreign consumers wholesale, rather than integrating each method one by one. For PSPs and acquirers, it opens new ground in orchestration, routing, and optimisation across fragmented ecosystems. And for regulators, it extends the gains of domestic instant payments – efficiency, transparency, inclusion – across borders without surrendering local control of national infrastructure.

That last point matters most. Many of the systems driving this shift were built as public infrastructure, often with central banks playing a leading role – though governance and ownership models differ from market to market. The private sector’s role is not to compete with them, but to help them reach further.

The 8B perspective

At 8B, we see the future of payments as a network of connected ecosystems rather than competing ones. Our work is to connect payment ‘islands’ without asking users, banks, wallets, or merchants to abandon what they already use. The consumer stays in their home app; the merchant stays on domestic acceptance infrastructure; the value sits in the connectivity layer between them.

The goal is simple: pay like a local. A traveller should be able to land in another country, scan a local QR code with their home app, see the final amount in their own currency, confirm, and move on. The routing, FX, compliance, fraud controls, and settlement underneath should stay invisible – and stay aligned with each market’s rules. That logic is especially relevant in high-tourism, high-migration corridors such as Central Asia, where digital payment behaviour is already mature but cross-border experiences remain inconsistent.

Why AI becomes part of the infrastructure

AI is most useful where cross-border QR payments stop being a clean technical flow and become an operational problem: choosing the best route, detecting abnormal merchant or consumer behaviour, supporting risk and transaction monitoring, estimating settlement exposure, and helping treasury teams respond when FX conditions move quickly. These are not replacements for payment rails. They are control layers around them.

The rails remain the foundation. AI’s role is to make them work more intelligently and efficiently as cross-border payment corridors become broader, faster, and more complex.

From domestic success to global interoperability

Payment innovation has moved through clear phases. The first digitised domestic payments. The second made them instant and mobile-first. The next is interoperability – and Scan-to-Pay is among the most practical routes to it, because it combines the three things the market already wants: lower friction, lower cost, and familiar behaviour.

It is unlikely that the next layer of cross-border payments will be won by one more closed wallet.   It will be the domestic systems the world already trusts, connected through intelligent infrastructure that makes paying abroad feel exactly like paying at home: both public or private but surely at nationwide scale.    

About the author

A fintech and payments executive with over 20 years of experience across banking and cross-border payments, Bogdan Zadorozhny, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at 8B, has held leadership roles at Ant Group, Citi, and Visa. He is particularly focused on AI-driven financial products, A2A payment rails, QR interoperability, cross-border payment infrastructure, and emerging technologies such as digital assets.

    

About 8B

8B is a cross-border Scan-to-Pay and ecommerce payments infrastructure connecting fintech, ecommerce, and travel platforms to national QR payment systems through a single API. The platform enables consumers to pay in-store and online using their domestic banking apps and local payment methods, with transactions routed via domestic instant-payment rails and supported by integrated settlement, FX, and cross-border routing. Founded in 2022, 8B operates across 30+ countries.

 

Sources:

[1] ACI Worldwide, Prime Time for Real-Time — Global Report 2024 (in partnership with GlobalData), 2024; figure refers to 2023 global real-time transaction volumes.

[2] Juniper Research, QR Code Payments: Key Trends, Competitor Analysis and Market Forecasts 2025–2030, 2025.

[3] National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI Product Statistics, calendar year 2025 (228.3 billion transactions).

[4] Bank of Thailand, Cross-border Payment: ASEAN Payment Connectivity and PromptPay Linkages.

[5] NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) and Monetary Authority of Singapore, UPI–PayNow linkage; expansion to 19 Indian banks announced July 2025.

[6] Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Project Nexus; operated by Nexus Global Payments (NGP), 2025.