Start with the customer, not the infrastructure

Domestic payments have made significant progress in many markets. Customers have become familiar with payments that are fast, transparent and available around the clock. Cross-border payments have also improved, but additional complexity remains whenever money moves between jurisdictions.

The answer is not simply to replace correspondent banking or to build an entirely new global network. It is more likely to be a combination of existing and emerging capabilities. The important question is how effectively they interoperate across networks and jurisdictions.

Some friction will remain necessary. Payments must comply with regulation, manage risk and protect customers. Our task is to ensure that this is appropriate friction, applied where it adds protection, rather than complexity that could be removed.

Customers are generally less concerned with the underlying technology than with practical outcomes. How quickly will the payment arrive? Is the timing certain? Can its progress be seen? Is the right liquidity available in the right place? Those are the questions that should continue to guide investment and innovation. 
 

Progress will come from combining the old and the new

The discussion reinforced that evolution and revolution are not mutually exclusive. The industry must continue improving the core capabilities on which customers rely, while also testing technologies that could address specific problems in new ways.

That means modernising correspondent banking through better data, connectivity, liquidity management and access to domestic instant-payment systems. At the same time, the industry is exploring tokenised deposits, distributed-ledger technologies, digital assets and new settlement models.

The value will not come from adopting technology for its own sake. A technically impressive proposition still needs a clear business case, a viable operating model and a customer problem worth solving.

This is particularly important because running established and new processes side by side can introduce additional cost and complexity. Successful innovation therefore needs a credible route from experiment to adoption. It must either improve the customer experience, strengthen resilience, reduce risk or make the movement of money more efficient. Ideally, it should achieve several of these outcomes together. 
 

Compliance can support a better customer experience

Compliance is sometimes presented as an obstacle to faster cross-border payments. I see it differently. Regulation and compliance exist for good reasons, including resilience, fair competition, risk management and positive customer outcomes.

The opportunity is to build these requirements into payment journeys more intelligently, rather than treating them as a separate exercise or doing only the minimum necessary.

Upfront validation is a good example. Checking payment information before a transaction is sent can help prevent inaccurate data from entering the process and reduce the likelihood of a payment being misdirected. It can also support greater certainty for both the payer and beneficiary.

This is where richer data and better interoperability can make a tangible difference. The objective should be to introduce controls where they are needed, remove avoidable friction elsewhere and make protection a meaningful part of the overall customer proposition. 
 

AI needs innovation, governance and trust in equal measure

Artificial intelligence is already creating practical opportunities across payments. Potential applications discussed by the panel included fraud monitoring, sanctions screening, onboarding, servicing, reconciliation, liquidity management and cash-flow forecasting.

However, opportunity must be considered alongside responsibility. Within a payment flow, we need to understand how AI is being used, establish appropriate governance and maintain effective controls.

Trust is the golden thread. When customers entrust a bank with their money and ask it to make payments on their behalf, they need confidence that the bank has their back. As increasingly autonomous technology develops, the industry will need clear principles around control, accountability and liability.

This cannot be solved by individual institutions in isolation. Banks and other participants need to work together on common approaches that allow innovation to progress without compromising the trust on which the payments system depends. NatWest has begun conversations with a small group of like-minded banks about the principles an industry framework could require. There is more work to do, but establishing a shared starting point matters.
 

Digital assets must be judged by the use case

The panel offered different perspectives on stablecoins and tokenised deposits, which reflects the wider debate taking place across the industry.

My own view is that we should keep returning to the underlying use case. In some markets, digital assets may address challenges associated with currency volatility, access or liquidity. In other situations, existing payment infrastructure may already move money effectively, while the main difficulty remains converting funds into local currency or navigating local requirements.

The key question is not whether a technology is new or generating interest. It is whether it addresses a genuine customer pain point at scale. We should remain open to the potential of digital assets, while being disciplined about where they offer a meaningful improvement over established approaches. 

Collaboration must move beyond the pilot stage

Payments are a network business, so progress depends on collaboration. Events such as Sibos show the value of bringing banks, market infrastructures, technology providers, policymakers and other participants together.

There are already examples demonstrating that collaboration can deliver working technology. But the next challenge is to turn more proofs of concept into live services with sufficient reach, scale and customer relevance.

Initiatives such as Project Agorá offer an important opportunity to explore how jurisdictions and central banks might work together. Yet success will still depend on a well-defined use case and a clear understanding of the customer problem being addressed. 

We should also be realistic. Complete global harmonisation is unlikely. Regulations, market structures and customer needs will continue to vary, while geopolitical considerations will remain part of the landscape. Some fragmentation is an inevitable consequence of innovation.

Standards can provide the connective tissue. Fully embedding ISO 20022 and establishing common foundations for cross-border retail payments can help different markets and technologies operate together more effectively. The aim should not be to eliminate every difference, but to prevent those differences from becoming unnecessary barriers for customers.
 

From possibility to purposeful progress

So, is the future of cross-border payments evolution or revolution? I believe it is intelligent coexistence.

We need to keep strengthening the infrastructure that already supports customers around the world. We also need to experiment responsibly with new rails, technologies and operating models. Above all, we need to connect these developments around common standards, sound governance and clearly understood customer needs.

The industry has made more progress than it sometimes gives itself credit for. The next phase should focus that momentum on the areas where collaboration can make the greatest practical difference.

Just because something is technologically possible does not automatically make it the right thing to do. The strongest innovations will be those that combine technology with a commercial, operational and customer lens, making cross-border payments more certain, transparent and accessible without losing the safeguards and trust that matter most.