Picture this: You split a dinner bill in Mumbai with a tap. Your taxi app, your utility bills, your weekend chai—money moves in seconds and costs almost nothing. That’s everyday India.
Now try sending money to a cousin in Singapore, or collecting a $500 invoice from a client in New York. The “tap and it’s done” feeling disappears. You’re asked for bank codes and obscure addresses, then you wait days and lose a noticeable chunk to fees and FX mark-ups. How can money be lightning-fast inside one country and sludge across a border?
The world already runs on fast rails, just not together.
India isn’t an outlier anymore. Around the world, fast, low-cost payment rails are thriving. Europe’s SEPA Instant moves euros in under 10 seconds, Brazil’s Pix handles over 6.3 billion payments a month, worth over R$2 trillion, and Singapore’s PayNow clears over S$100 billion annually. In the US, RTP processed US$246 billion in 2024, with FedNow expanding rapidly. Add to that global card networks, accepted at 150 million+ locations, and emerging stablecoin rails, which enable near-instant 24/7 value transfer across time zones. Yet, despite these advances, they don’t connect. The world runs on fast rails, just not together.
And yet, the global experience lags
Your UPI ID means nothing to a bank in Berlin; an IBAN doesn’t map neatly to an Indian account; wallets in one country can’t “talk” to those in another. Imagine dozens of high-speed metro systems, each brilliant within its city, but the moment you go inter-city, you’re back to buses and dusty highways.
Why the magic stops at the border
Cross-border money still takes the long road: correspondent banks, time zones, and business-hour cut-offs. The backbone for most international transfers is SWIFT, a network designed in the 1970s—reliable, but not built for today’s consumer-grade instant UX. The human price is real: in 2024, sending $200 across borders still cost about 6.5% on average, more than double the UN’s 3% target. India received about $129 billion in remittances last year; even a couple of percentage points in friction means billions that don’t reach families or small businesses. Beyond cost, many cross-border transfers still take 2–5 business days to settle. Try managing cash flow on that lag.
The quiet revolution: connecting what already works
The real breakthrough isn’t another shiny rail; it’s interoperability, making existing rails talk to each other. India and Singapore have already linked UPI and PayNow, enabling instant transfers through familiar apps. UPI now works in the UAE, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and even at the Eiffel Tower. Europe’s SEPA Instant connects multiple countries under one fast-pay standard, while the BIS-led Project Nexus is linking Asian systems so payments clear across borders in under a minute. Even banks are joining in: J.P. Morgan’s Coin/Kinexys and Citi Token Services are piloting tokenised settlements to move funds across time zones instantly. It’s not flashy, but this quiet connectivity is reshaping how money moves worldwide.
What interoperability changes for real people
For families, remittances move in minutes, not days, and cost less. For freelancers and small exporters, collecting an overseas payment stops feeling like a penalty and becomes a normal cash-in. For the broader economy, domestic innovations like UPI and Pix stop being isolated success stories and start behaving like nodes in one network: cash flow improves, settlement risk falls, and more players—banks and fintechs—can plug in under clear rules.
The hard parts we still have to solve
Interoperability isn’t just code; it’s coordination.
• Finish the data job: ISO 20022 is more than a format swap; everyone must actually send and receive structured fields end-to-end so payments don’t fall out of straight-through processing when they cross borders.
• Make compliance real-time: AML, KYC, and sanctions checks were built for batch files, not instant transfers. We need in-flow checks and shared utilities, privacy-aware by design.
• Tame FX risk: Extend “both sides settle together” (PvP-like) safety to more currencies. Tokenised deposits or well-regulated stablecoins can deliver atomic (all-or-nothing) settlement in corridors that big systems don’t cover.
• Agree on access and rules: Let regulated non-banks connect under supervision, and publish clear cross-border scheme rules so users get a predictable experience.
The future won’t be won by one app or rail. It’ll be won when any rail—UPI, SEPA Instant, FedNow, Pix, cards, even stablecoins—can pass money to any other cleanly, instantly, and at a fair cost. The pieces are already on the board: instant rails at home, global card acceptance, and 24/7 settlement tools. What’s missing is alignment, shared data, shared rules, and shared ways to hop borders. Regulators, banks, and builders each own a piece of that puzzle. Put it together, and in a few years, we’ll wonder why cross-border ever felt slow. Interoperability is the job. A simpler everyday money experience is the reward.
(Srivatsan Sridhar is Co-Founder and CEO, Skydo, a cross-border payments platform.)
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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