By Patrick Gauthier, CEO of Convera
2026 is when cross-border payments stop being something businesses can leave to the back office. The G20 has set 2027 targets requiring most payments to arrive within an hour and cost less to send, and those targets are close enough now that regulators are checking progress against them rather than just publishing them. From November, ISO 20022 will require structured address data on every cross-border payment message. Stablecoins are now on the agenda for mainstream corporate treasurers, not just crypto traders.
Taken together, these changes leave most businesses with a decision to make now rather than later. Treat each new deadline as it lands, patch the process, and move to the next one. Or treat payments as infrastructure worth building properly once, so the next regulatory change or new market doesn’t mean starting again. Get that right, and adding a market next year is a configuration change. Get it wrong, and it’s the third rebuild of the payments stack in five years.
A few different pressures are hitting payments infrastructure at the same time, which is what makes this particular year harder to ignore than the last few. Regulators want better data behind every payment, not just a faster one. Customers and suppliers want to know when money will land, not just that it eventually will. Businesses expanding into new markets are finding the banking networks there thinner than the ones they’re used to, and new payment rails are launching faster than most finance teams have time to evaluate them properly. The real skill for a finance leader here is knowing which combination of existing rails actually gives the business confidence to operate wherever it needs to, not spotting the newest one first.
Beyond cost and speed
For a long time, payments were judged almost entirely on cost and speed. That is changing. Geopolitical volatility, hard regulatory deadlines and rising expectations from customers and suppliers are putting payments resilience on the boardroom agenda. When a payment fails to arrive, it isn’t just an inconvenience. Suppliers go unpaid, trade slows, and trust erodes. In an environment shaped by sanctions shifts, currency swings and shifting trade routes, the ability to move money reliably, regardless of what else is happening in the world, is now a genuine measure of business resilience.
The rise of the multi-rail strategy
That resilience increasingly depends on how many rails a business can call on, and how well they connect. Real-time payment systems are linking up across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa and the Gulf, creating faster, more direct routes for money to move between markets that once depended on lengthy correspondent banking chains. Businesses are relying less on a single bank relationship as a result. A multi-rail approach, using different combinations of banks, networks and local payment schemes depending on where money needs to go, is becoming the default. A business that can only move money one way is a business with a single point of failure.
This is also why there is no longer a one-size-fits-all answer to cross-border payments. The right rail for paying a supplier in Vietnam is not the right rail for paying one in Brazil. The right approach for a fully regulated financial institution counterparty looks different from the right approach for a smaller, newer trading partner in an emerging market. Corridor, counterparty and regulatory context all shape the decision now, and businesses that default to whatever rail they used last year, rather than the one that fits the transaction in front of them, will pay for that inertia in cost, speed or risk.
That means finance and treasury leaders need to ask more strategic questions of their payments infrastructure. Which corridors are becoming more important to the business? Where are payment failures or delays most damaging to supplier trust? Which counterparties require the certainty of bank rails, and where could local payment schemes or emerging alternatives improve speed and transparency? A multi-rail strategy is a way of matching each payment to the route that best serves the commercial objective behind it, not a technology wishlist.
Growth is moving, and infrastructure should follow
The stakes are rising because growth itself is becoming more distributed. It is no longer only large multinationals moving money between London, New York and Frankfurt. Mid-market businesses and exporters are building supplier, customer and partner relationships across Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Africa and Latin America, often in corridors where payment transparency is weaker and correspondent banking routes are slower or less predictable. In those markets, the gap between businesses with resilient, multi-rail payments infrastructure and those still relying on legacy routes will become more visible.
None of this is about technology for its own sake. ISO 20022 compliance, G20 targets and stablecoin experimentation are means, not ends. The real test is whether a business can pay a supplier in Ho Chi Minh City as confidently as one in Frankfurt, adapt when a regulator changes the rules or a bank relationship becomes constrained, and keep its payments infrastructure aligned with where its growth is actually happening.
Businesses that start asking these questions now, while the November ISO 20022 deadline and 2027 G20 targets are still ahead of them, will have more room to make deliberate choices about their infrastructure. Those that wait may still tick the compliance box. They will have missed the chance to make payments a genuine advantage, rather than a reactive process.
Payments have become one of the most consequential strategic decisions a growing business makes.
Building payments infrastructure deliberately, rather than patching it deal by deal, is what lets a company stand out when it comes to managing cash flow and working capital, building strategic relationships with key suppliers, and delivering the right customer experience. Those are proven ways to build enterprise value.
