Despite broad modernization across finance, cross-border payments remain a persistent frustration and a drag on operations and finances, with high fees, slow settlement, limited visibility and weak automation.
This creates a disconnect between how companies manage capital and how money actually moves globally. Settlement is unpredictable, liquidity must be pre-positioned, and reconciliation depends on coordinating across multiple banks with different payment and reporting systems.
The impact on working capital is significant: Uncertain timelines require liquidity buffers, poor visibility weakens forecasting, and manual processes increase costs and error risk.
The History and Friction of Cross-Border Payments
For more than 50 years, cross-border payments have relied on banks around the world to handle risk, compliance, ledgering, foreign exchange, liquidity, data sharing and payment processing independently—without purpose-built bank software. And, they’ve never had the ability to share and interrogate data, move money or audit counterparty obligations in real time between each other.
Bottom line: Originating, correspondent, intermediary and receiving banks rely on manual workflows, disconnected internal systems and limited data sharing across a fragmented network—representing a system built more on trust than transparency.
That trust has weakened. Audits have exposed failures to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and human trafficking, leading to fines, enforcement actions and, in some jurisdictions, personal liability for bank executives, including jail time.
More than half of international transactions also rely on intermediary currencies, adding foreign exchange exposure, cost and processing layers. Many cross-border payments route through USD, creating double conversion.
Basel III rules have further raised the cost and complexity of correspondent banking by tightening capital, liquidity and compliance requirements. Banks must hold more capital and allocate balances to high-quality liquid assets, lowering returns and, occasionally, making the business unprofitable.
Rising labor costs, shrinking bank technology budgets and competing priorities add further pressure. Given this, it’s understandable that 25% of the world’s correspondent banks exited between 2009 and 2016, even as cross-border payments reached $208 trillion in 2025.
Rising demand in a massive, growing market, combined with shrinking supply from a broken model, has spurred new innovation. First-principles software and new infrastructure for the existing correspondent banking model are now available. At the same time, new paradigms and technologies have emerged to challenge the dysfunction of the incumbent model.
Fix No. 1: Infrastructure for the Correspondent Bank Ecosystem
Correspondent banks can now use enterprise software to address inefficiencies and risks in counterparty oversight, transaction analysis, FX handling, global funds movement and last-mile payment orchestration.
At the center is the Global Single Shared Platform (GSSP), a central-bank-inspired architecture purpose-built for cross-border payments through financial institutions. Modeled on how central banks move money between banks in a single country, GSSP digitizes the end-to-end payment value chain across multiple financial institutions around the world into a single infrastructure layer without requiring new laws, regulations or rulebooks.
The platform digitizes risk and compliance workflows that were previously manual, costly, slow and inconsistent. It also gives each participating bank visibility into the rules, processes and outcomes of upstream and downstream intermediaries, ensuring transparency and efficiency.
Fix No. 2: New Paradigms from Mastercard Move, Visa Direct, Corpay, Monex and Moneycorp
New paradigms and capabilities are transforming cross-border payments through banks. For example, Mastercard Move enables bank customers to send funds to more than 100 countries and currencies, with nearly 50 offering instant, 24/7 delivery. Funds can also be sent from a bank to mobile money accounts, digital wallets, cards or cash pickup locations almost instantly in dozens of countries.
For non-U.S. originating banks and financial institutions, these new options are invaluable. As correspondent banks have declined, it’s become nearly impossible for a bank to offer customers international transfers.
(Disclosure: Payall has working relationships with these companies, and I myself have personal and professional relationships with some of their senior executives. None are investors, have employees on my board or as advisors, nor have any input into our strategy, software or positioning.)
What About Stablecoins?
Stablecoins may help solve legacy ledgering and funds-movement challenges between businesses independent of banks, but banks still need software to work safely with stablecoin providers. Also, lower interest rates, or changes in who benefits from float, will compromise the stablecoin model.
Banks must perform risk and compliance checks, convert USD into local currency—liquidity required—and deliver payments to local rails when working with a stablecoin exchange. And at the front end, banks remain exposed to risk—inefficiencies and trust issues persist with stablecoin players who must execute know your customer and know your transaction to ensure data entering the chain is authenticated.
Also, while bank regulations are evolving, many banks remain wary of new counterparty risks. They worry about financial and reputational losses if a stablecoin counterparty fails, there's a technology glitch or another issue arises outside their control and money evaporates; no one knows how courts will rule when these occur.
CFOs must weigh these risks as well.
The Ride Will Be Bumpy
As with any new technology, early adopters should expect challenges, and CFOs should plan accordingly.
For the first time, disparate bank technology stacks around the world will connect through GSSP infrastructure that digitizes manual workflows. Controls will be calibrated to detect anomalous or suspicious activity; third-party services will orchestrate FX, liquidity and AI; multiple ledgers across institutions and currency accounts will be credited and debited instantly; and payments will move across many rails instantly.
Things will most certainly go wrong. Settings may be too sensitive. Third-party providers will fail. Banks and the GSSP will need time to learn and improve. Bear this in mind and build wiggle room into your plans.
Wait and See? Or Cross-Border Payments as a Strength?
With correspondent bank technologies, new paradigms such as Mastercard Move and stablecoins, what should CFOs do?
Some may continue tolerating the pain and wait before searching for a bank that supports a new model or exposing the company to the uncertain risks of stablecoins—assuming the use case works at all. For others, the answer is clear: Cross-border payments can become a strategic strength, differentiator and even a profit center.
