Banks at the Crossroads of Payments Disruption
The payments landscape is no longer simply evolving, it is fragmenting and accelerating beyond banks’ direct control. Real-time rails, tokenized money, embedded finance, and AI-driven, agentic commerce are reshaping how value moves. Yet the core challenge for banks is not technology, but relevance. Nearly 40% of global banking executives believe payments innovation will be led by Big Tech by 2030, underscoring a critical strategic question: where do banks sit in the emerging value chain?
Banks face a clear choice. At one end, they risk becoming low-margin utilities- invisible processors powering someone else’s platform. At the other, they can act as orchestrators, owning liquidity, compliance and programmable settlement rails that underpin digital commerce. Between these poles lie hybrid models, including consortium networks, embedded finance partnerships and API-led monetization strategies.
Disruption is inevitable; differentiation depends on response. From 2026 onward, payments will operate across multi-rail architectures, tokenized settlement layers and agentic transaction networks. Legacy rails alone will no longer confer advantage. Winners will be banks that adopt composable platforms, embrace tokenization and expose machine-grade APIs-transforming payments from a cost center into a growth engine.
Four forces will shape this transition: tokenization and regulated stablecoins; cross-border modernization and agentic commerce; consortium-led ecosystems; and the rise of interoperable, multi-network payment corridors.
Authors:
Siva Subramaniam, Heena Mahajan
Tokenization and Regulated Stablecoins
Tokenization and regulated stablecoins are moving from experimentation to meaningful infrastructure. Stablecoin issuance has doubled since early 2024, with daily volumes now around US$30 billion, signalling accelerating institutional and market adoption. At the same time, growing regulatory clarity in major markets including the US, EU, UK, Hong Kong and Japan is lowering barriers for traditional financial institutions to participate in these networks. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits are increasingly viewed as an “always-on” alternative to the correspondent banking network, offering real-time, programmable settlement, reduced float, fewer intermediaries and greater transparency across borders. New use are emerging in B2B treasury management, supply chain finance and repo markets, positioning tokenized money as an enterprise-grade settlement layer rather than a niche crypto instrument.
For banks, the strategic mandate is clear: treat tokenization as a modular extension of settlement architecture. The path forward begins with defining custody and compliance models, integrating token rails alongside traditional ones, and piloting corridors where regulatory clarity exists, tracking metrics such as settlement latency, reconciliation time, float reduction, custody cost per transaction, and failed settlement rate.
Cross-Border Modernization & Agentic Commerce
Cross-border payments are evolving rapidly as legacy correspondent rails give way to multi-rail networks that combine real-time payment (RTP) systems, regional clearing schemes, card networks, and tokenized corridors. At the same time, momentum is building around agentic commerce: AI agents and bots that autonomously initiate and settle payments, often across borders, creating demand for APIs with high reliability, deterministic settlement semantics, and guaranteed liquidity availability. However, this shift requires more than speed, it demands programmable, machine-grade payment rails that can guarantee settlement, compliance, and rollback logic.
To stay relevant in the world of machine-driven commerce, institutions must build a multi-rail treasury and settlement architecture that integrates legacy networks (SWIFT/ISO-20022), domestic and regional instant rails, ledger- or token-based corridors, and programmable, machine-grade APIs with formal SLAs and rollback/exception handling. Key operational metrics should include pre-funding efficiency, API uptime/SLA compliance, settlement latency, reconciliation time and failed-rollback incident rates. Banks that master these levers - combining liquidity, speed, transparency and resilience, will control the rails of global, real-time, machine-driven commerce.
Case in Point: Mastercard has launched its Agentic Payments Program (Mastercard Agent Pay) and is partnering with Microsoft, IBM, and leading checkout platforms to embed tokenised, AI-initiated payments inside conversational and enterprise AI systems, enabling autonomous transaction initiation for both consumers and B2B use cases.
Consortiums and Closed User Groups
Banks, card networks, and regional ecosystems are increasingly forming consortiums and Closed User Groups (CUGs) to create private payment and settlement rails for defined corridors or industries. This is accelerating as cross-border payments still cost 6–7% on average and can take 1–3 days to settle. In response, SWIFT has launched live pilots with over 30 banks to test tokenized asset transfers across multiple blockchains and private ledgers. Similarly, projects such as Partior (DBS, JP Morgan, Temasek) and Fnality are building bank-led settlement networks for interbank payments and securities. These targeted networks reduce intermediaries, enable programmable compliance rules, improve FX efficiency, and deliver preferential liquidity within closed ecosystems.
For banks, participation in consortia is fast becoming a strategic decision about control, market position, and margin defence rather than just infrastructure choice. High-value corridors such as US–Asia trade routes, Middle East–India remittances, and energy or commodities settlement are increasingly being served through private networks to improve speed and cost. The strategic imperative for CXOs is to define where to lead, join or partner by evaluating corridor volume, regulatory complexity, margin upside and partner readiness. Key success metrics include corridor-level cost per transaction, settlement latency, FX efficiency, market share within the corridor, and ecosystem stickiness.
Multi-network disruption: Moving beyond SWIFT as the default rail
For decades, cross-border payments have relied almost entirely on SWIFT-based correspondent banking networks. That dominance is now being challenged. Global card schemes, fintech networks, regional payment systems and blockchain-enabled rails are offering faster, cheaper and more programmable alternatives. Mastercard, for instance, has launched Mastercard Move Commercial Payments to enable near real-time cross-border B2B transfers, bypassing traditional correspondent banking chains and reducing settlement friction for banks and corporates . In parallel, regional initiatives such as China’s CIPS, pan-regional RTP linkages, and blockchain networks like RippleNet continue to erode SWIFT’s historical monopoly on cross-border messaging and settlement
This fragmentation is not weakening cross-border payments; it is redefining control. Banks now have the opportunity to architect multi-rail strategies that route transactions dynamically based on speed, cost, risk and regulatory constraints. Instead of one universal rail, the future is a network of interoperable corridors, some governed by card schemes, others by regional clearing systems, fintech consortia, or tokenized settlement networks.
The Road Ahead: Continuous Modernisation through Composable Payments
The future of payments will not be shaped by one-time transformation programmes but by continuous modernisation. As new rails, regulatory frameworks, digital assets, agentic commerce and cross-border networks emerge in parallel, banks can no longer rely on rigid, monolithic payment architectures. To remain relevant, they must shift towards composable payment platforms that are designed to evolve, integrate and reconfigure in real time. This is less about replacing existing systems and more about orchestrating them through modular, adaptable capabilities that can plug into new networks, standards and business models as they emerge.
Built on modular components, API-driven interoperability and ISO 20022 standards, composable platforms enable banks to scale with rising transaction volumes, integrate seamlessly with multiple rails, and rapidly introduce new services without destabilising the core. They also strengthen resilience by isolating risk, simplifying compliance with evolving regulations and supporting continuous innovation. In an environment where payments are becoming embedded, automated, tokenised and globally interconnected, composability is no longer a technology option; it is a strategic imperative that underpins long-term competitiveness and relevance.
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References
- https://transak.com/blog/stablecoins-powering-global-money-movement-report-2025
- https://orbitalxploration.com/
- https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2312c.pdf
- https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases
- https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org
- https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/swift-gpi
- https://www.mastercard.com/news/press/2024
- https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/payments
- https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/payments
- https://www.aciworldwide.com/real-time-payments-report
- https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/press/2025
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