Global Payments in Transition – Innovation, Interoperability & Inclusion
For decades, the global payments system has been a quiet achiever. Invisible to most consumers and businesses, it has functioned with remarkable stability - secure, reliable, and largely unchanged in its foundations. Central banks and commercial banks have dominated their further development that was focused very much on domestic boundaries with some interlinkage through correspondent banking systems. But this long-standing equilibrium is now shifting. At this session of the Digital Finance Day 2025, experts highlighted how payments are entering an era of profound structural disruption, shaped by new rails and technologies, changing geopolitical realities, and new market actors.
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Upgraded Rails and New Technologies
Innovation in the global payments system is no longer driven solely by traditional financial institutions. Big tech companies, fintechs, crypto-players, and sector-specific ecosystems are introducing their own infrastructures, business models, and incentives. This widening mix of actors is accelerating innovation but also creating new challenges around interoperability, market fragmentation, and systemic risk.
Regulators across jurisdictions are now grappling with the task of modernising payments oversight. They face the dual challenge of enabling innovation while safeguarding stability and consumer protection. New rulebooks for instant payments, stablecoins, digital identity, anti-fraud standards, and cyber resilience frameworks are already reshaping the competitive landscape. Speakers emphasised that the regulatory direction is neither uniform nor politically neutral. Divergence between regions - whether intentional or accidental - has meaningful implications for cost structures, cross-border payment and data flows, and competitive alignment among payment ecosystems.
Geopolitics Moves into the Payments Sphere
What was once a purely technical domain has become a geopolitical focal point. Competing digital currency initiatives, sanctions architectures, infrastructure dependencies, and data-sovereignty debates are blurring the boundaries between finance and foreign policy. The evolution of payment systems is increasingly tied to questions of national autonomy, global influence, and strategic resilience. As one speaker noted: “Control over payment infrastructures is becoming as important as control over energy or critical raw materials.”
This notion also drives many projects that are exploring pan-European payments systems such as the interlinkage of the Swiss Interbank Clearing System with the European TARGET2 Euro Clearing System - a project presented by one Speaker.
New Actors in the Value Chain
The rise of agentic commerce - where AI agents autonomously initiate purchases, negotiate on behalf of users, and interact with other agents - will dramatically shift how payments are triggered, authorized, and reconciled. In such an environment, transaction may occur with or without direct consumer involvement, new forms of machine-to-machine micropayments will emerge, and merchant and customer relationships could be intermediated by algorithms. Thus, trust will need to be embedded at the agent level, not just the user level. According to the speakers, this shift challenges long-held assumptions about user consent, liability, authentication, and revenue models. Payment systems will need to adapt to a world where machines behave as economic actors.
The future is difficult to foresee, and banks will need to adapt
As systems become more fragmented and at the same time interconnected, they will become more complex and automated. This led the panelists to conclude that trust and security will become even more important in the future. Fraud will be scaled with digitalization and AI-driven attacks will become more sophisticated. New intermediaries often operate under different risk philosophies than banks. And as payors – be it humans or machines – adopt new digital behaviors, their expectations around protection, transparency, and recourse are evolving.
Tomorrow’s payments ecosystem won’t be defined by a single technology or actor, but by the interplay of innovation, trust, security, and global coordination.