Over the years, I’ve had multiple conversations around the future of cross-border payments. And the dominant theme across each of these interactions, whether at conferences, roundtables, or partner meetings has always been that real transformation was on the horizon, something that’s yet to come.
Last month at BAFT’s Global Annual Meeting, it became clear the change we have all been expecting is already here. Sitting across from banks, payment providers, technology firms and compliance leaders, I recognised that the conversation had shifted. The global payments industry is rapidly moving toward an interoperable, real-time ecosystem connecting bank accounts, wallets, and emerging digital payment endpoints through standardised infrastructure and richer data frameworks. We were no longer debating whether institutions should modernise cross-border payments. Instead, the focus was on one question: how fast can we move?
What was once considered a future-state modernisation initiative is now becoming an immediate strategic priority for banks globally. Evolving toward real-time global money movement while maintaining compliance, transparency, operational resilience, and trusted correspondent banking relationships.
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The biggest conversations at BAFT
For years, modernising global payments was seen as a long-horizon project. It was always considered important but rarely urgent. This lack of urgency was further supported by complex legacy infrastructure, correspondent banking relationships and the state of the cross-border regulatory landscape.
However, a lot has changed. In the recent past, the competitive pressure has become too loud to ignore. Customers, consumers and businesses alike are experiencing real-time payments in a domestic setting and increasingly expect the same payment experience when moving money across borders. This shift in expectations, the undeniable appetite for real-time cross-border payments is urging banks, with growing clarity, to act now.
Considering these developments, the 3 days at BAFT centre-staged several significant themes:
- The ISO 20022 migration and the value of richer payment data.
- How banks can expand their reach and power real-time cross-border payments to wallets & accounts without increasing operational complexity.
- The need for payment interoperability between SWIFT, RTP networks, wallets, and fintech ecosystems.
- FATF Travel Rule enforceability and regulatory transparency, standardisation of hybrid addresses and payment identities.
- The growing role of fintech and paytech infrastructure providers in enabling bank modernisation.
Perhaps, the most important takeaway here was the unanimous belief that the future of payments demands interoperability across multiple rails, networks, and endpoint types, not the replacement of one system by another.
The backbone: why ISO 20022 matters more than ever
One of the most substantive discussions at BAFT centred around the strategic importance of SWIFT ISO 20022 messaging standards. And rightly so. At TerraPay, this doesn’t surprise us. We’ve seen this play out across corridors and markets we operate in.
ISO 20022 is not about being a compliance checkbox or just a messaging upgrade. It is the common language that allows very different payment systems to understand each other. Richer, structured, standardised payment data results in better sanctions screening, stronger KYC validation, more automated compliance, and cleaner payment traceability end-to-end, across the global financial ecosystem. In an era where payments are increasingly moving between ecosystems (think wallets, mobile money and not just traditional bank accounts), this shared language becomes foundational.
The richer data capabilities of ISO 20022 help banks and payment providers associate beneficiary information, originator details, wallet identifiers, and compliance data in a more standardised and enforceable format. This is especially relevant for FATF Travel Rule compliance. As payment flows become more fragmented across ecosystems, the ability to reliably carry originator and beneficiary information through every hop of a transaction isn’t just a regulatory requirement but tool for trust. And when properly implemented, ISO 20022, makes that enforcement far more robust.
The competitive advantage of ISO 20022 is significant and banks/financial institutions are recognising that.
The real conversation: interoperability, not replacement
What became evident during the BAFT Global Annual Meeting is that TerraPay’s strategy is closely aligned with the direction banks are heading in. The future that banks are building towards has interoperability as the architecture, not as a nice-to-have feature. However, this doesn’t mean that modernization replaces older rails. On the contrary, the key is to build around existing rails without disproportionate integration complexities.
This approach shapes how banks think about partnerships and highlights the strategic importance of having the right payment infrastructure partner.
Today, banks are looking to expand their reach globally, provide last-mile connectivity. They want deeper access to wallets and local RTP systems but without sacrificing the trusted correspondent banking relationships that underpin their current operations. Banks want to move at the speed that global payments demand but not by compromising on compliance and governance standards. To do so, they need the right infrastructure partner, one that has already done the work of connecting into hundreds of wallet providers, local payment schemes, and clearing networks globally.
One of the key takeaways from conversations at the BAFT Global Annual Meeting was a validation of what we at TerraPay have been working towards: Banks don’t need to choose between modernising and maintaining stability. The right interoperability layer lets them do both, i.e., extend reach to new payment endpoints, wallets, and corridors while preserving the compliance frameworks and correspondent relationships that define how they operate. Strategic partners with interoperable payment infrastructure via RMA connectivity, such as TerraPay, enable banks to scale faster while maintaining governance and compliance frameworks.
The competitive advantage lies in moving fast.
Interoperability is no longer optional
If BAFT 2026 told us anything, it’s that interoperability is no longer optional, it is increasingly becoming foundational to the future of global payments. And the window for deliberate action is narrowing faster than many institutions expected.
The next phase of transaction banking will not be defined by a single rail, a single network, or a single payment type. It will be defined by how effectively banks, SWIFT, wallets, RTP schemes, and fintechs work together. ISO 20022 will be the common language underpinning that collaboration, enabling the transparency and traceability that regulators demand and customers increasingly expect. And stablecoins like USDC and USDT will move from experiment to serious consideration for real-time cross-border settlement, particularly in wallet payouts and liquidity-constrained corridors.
The institutions best positioned to lead won’t necessarily be the largest, instead, they’ll be the ones capable of orchestrating connectivity across multiple ecosystems without sacrificing governance, compliance, or customer trust.
John Rodriguez, Senior Consultant, Director, Business Development – Global Payments (SWIFT) & Strategic Bank Partnerships, TerraPay
