Interview: Unlimit CEO Irene Skrynova on BRICS’ fast payments push and its impact on global finance

BRICS member countries are in talks to connect their fast payment systems and explore interoperability between central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

Against this backdrop, India is scheduled to host the 2026 edition of the annual BRICS summit this month to deepen multilateral engagement.

In this interview, Irene Skrynova, the CEO of Global Payments at Unlimit, unpacks how realistic the BRICS interoperability vision is, what hurdles remain, and how the global payments landscape might evolve as a result.

EPI: BRICS is discussing linking fast-payment systems and possibly CBDCs for cross-border transactions. In your view, how realistic are the chances of the bloc building a credible alternative to today’s dominant cross-border payments infrastructure?

Irene Skrynova: On specific routes, yes. Across the whole bloc, much harder.

Connecting two domestic payment systems is only the first step. A cross-border payment also needs currency conversion and liquidity; that’s where the difficulty scales.

Where two currencies are actively traded, the linkage can work. Where they are not, a bank or provider has to hold funds in both currencies in advance, or route the conversion through a third currency, usually the dollar. The payment can move directly between two domestic systems while the settlement behind it still depends on the existing international banking system.

The most viable corridors are those where large volumes already move in both directions. If flows are heavily one-way, providers accumulate one currency and run short of the other; then rebalance, and rebalancing has a price.

BRICS can build the technical rails. It cannot legislate the FX volumes or provider willingness that determine whether those rails are commercially competitive. That’s a market question, not a policy question.

EPI: A lot of attention goes to CBDCs, but do you think instant-payment system linkages could end up having a much bigger practical impact on global money movement?

Irene Skrynova: CBDCs get the headlines, and instant-payment linkages will get the volume. That’s the near-term reality.

Instant-payment systems already have deep domestic adoption. Connecting them internationally gives customers a faster cross-border experience without asking them to adopt a new form of money, so customers feel that immediately.

CBDCs sit in a different place as wholesale settlement between institutions. A customer could be making an ordinary instant bank payment from an app they already use, while a wholesale CBDC settles the transaction between banks in the background. That’s a real shift, but it happens invisibly.

From the customer’s perspective, the settlement rail is irrelevant. What matters is that the right amount arrives quickly and that the exchange rate and fees are clear before the payment is made. CBDCs could reshape settlement without ever changing what the customer sees.

Meanwhile, connected instant-payment systems will keep expanding corridor by corridor because customers already know how to use them.

EPI: If countries begin connecting domestic payment rails directly, how much could that really reduce dependence on traditional correspondent banking networks and existing international settlement channels?

Irene Skrynova: Less than the headlines suggest.

India and Singapore show the pattern. Linking UPI and PayNow gave customers a much faster and more direct way to send money between the two countries. But the banks behind those payments still used existing correspondent banking arrangements to settle.

The customer experience can change before the underlying settlement does. A cross-border payment can feel instant even while banks are still using traditional infrastructure behind the scenes.

A more fundamental shift comes only when new networks also handle FX conversion, provide the liquidity on both sides, and settle between institutions themselves. Until then, correspondent banks become less visible to the customer but still do the work.

And this won’t happen everywhere at the same pace. On busy routes with widely-traded currencies, direct alternatives are easy to build. On smaller routes, a global bank remains the easiest way to access the currency, liquidity, and local relationships needed to complete the payment.

EPI: From an operational standpoint, what actually needs to happen behind the scenes to make cross-border interoperability work between national payment systems, especially on FX conversion, liquidity management, settlement, compliance, and fraud controls?

Irene Skrynova: Start with the operating-hours mismatch. Instant-payment systems run 24/7. The FX markets supporting them don’t.

A cross-border payment sent on a Sunday still needs a guaranteed exchange rate and available destination-currency liquidity.

The wholesale FX market may barely be trading at that moment. The provider either holds enough of the relevant currencies in advance or accepts the risk of not being able to hedge immediately.

That challenge scales quickly across many currencies and uneven flows. Something that looks like a simple instant payment to the customer can create a fairly complicated treasury problem behind the scenes.

There is little value in moving the payment instruction in seconds if FX, compliance, or settlement adds hours back into the process. For the payment to be genuinely instant, every layer has to keep pace.

EPI: What do you see as the biggest barriers to scaling this model across multiple countries: technology, regulation, trust between central banks, commercial incentives, or something else?

Irene Skrynova: Liquidity. Not technology, not regulation. Liquidity.

Two countries can connect their payment systems technically, but every cross-border transaction still needs a bank, PSP, or FX provider that can supply the destination currency at a competitive rate, including at times when normal FX trading is quieter.

That’s straightforward for major currencies. It becomes much harder for currencies exchanged less frequently, particularly when flows run heavily in one direction.

Central banks can agree to connect two payment systems and put the necessary rules in place. They cannot guarantee that enough commercial providers will want to exchange those currencies at competitive rates. That depends on volumes, demand, and whether providers see a viable business case. Limited participation means limited competition, which means worse rates for the customer.

Governance also scales badly. Each new market brings its own rules and institutions, and participants need clear agreements on liability, disputes, and access.

A payment route can be technically ready and regulatorily backed, and still struggle commercially if too few providers support it.

EPI: Could regional payment initiatives such as those being discussed by BRICS improve global interoperability, or is there a risk they create competing payment blocs and further fragment the international payments ecosystem?

Irene Skrynova: Depends on the architecture. Bilateral connections don’t scale beyond a handful of countries. Shared networks do.

Every bilateral link means more technical integrations, operating agreements, and commercial relationships.

Shared networks solve this by letting each domestic system connect once to the same infrastructure, and payments move between participating members without every country having to build a link with every other one.

Nexus is a good example: the BIS Innovation Hub originally developed it to connect domestic instant-payment systems through a shared network. India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand are now working to bring that model into live use.

Fragmentation is still possible even with the same technical standard. Networks may differ on who can participate, what compliance checks apply, how disputes are handled, or how payments settle. Using the same messaging standard does not necessarily make two networks easy to connect in practice.

Regional initiatives should be judged partly on how easily they can connect beyond their original members. If each region builds a closed system with its own rules, international businesses simply end up with another set of payment silos.

EPI: How should banks, payment companies, and merchants prepare for a world in which local-currency settlement, instant-payment connectivity, and payments sovereignty become more important? Which capabilities should they prioritise now?

Irene Skrynova: Stop looking at headline processing fees.

A route can appear cheap and become expensive once you include FX, the cost of holding funds in another market, failed payments, and reconciliation.

Three capabilities become non-negotiable. First, routing intelligence, knowing which rail should carry which transaction based on destination, currency, liquidity, and customer preference. That used to be a nice-to-have but now it’s the core competency of a payments provider.

Second, treasury integrated with payments, not sitting in a separate function. If money moves instantly and settles in more local currencies, providers need to know where funds sit and be able to move liquidity between markets fast. A company can be well funded overall and still fail a transaction because it lacks the right currency in the right market.

Third, flexibility over commitment to any single rail. A global business shouldn’t have to build a new integration every time a country launches a new domestic system.

The winners will be those whose infrastructure absorbs new methods and routes as they appear without becoming another project.

EPI: From Unlimit’s perspective, how could greater connectivity between local payment systems affect your business? Do you see the biggest opportunities in cross-border processing, local acquiring, access to alternative payment methods, treasury and FX services, or helping merchants manage multiple payment ecosystems?

Irene Skrynova: All five matter, but most PSPs go wrong by framing them as separate opportunities.

The merchant doesn’t experience cross-border processing, acquiring, alternative methods, treasury, and FX as five distinct things. They experience one payments operation that either works across their markets or doesn’t. The biggest opportunity is being the provider that turns those five into one.

Everyone can do parts of this. Card acquirers do acquiring. FX brokers do FX. Local specialists do Pix or UPI. The merchant ends up with three vendors, four contracts, five reconciliation flows, and a treasury function that spends its week reconciling positions rather than deploying capital, and that’s not a payments strategy. That’s a project management problem the merchant didn’t sign up for. The market is moving toward providers who solve this as one system. Unlimit is built for that.

As more domestic rails open up internationally, the merchants who benefit are the ones whose infrastructure quietly absorbs each new route, without meetings, without another integration, without a new vendor.

Our job is to make that absorption invisible. Everything else is a feature. The consolidation is the product.