Rasha Abdel Jalil, Director of Financial Crime & Compliance at Eastnets, explains why scale is meaningless unless safeguards are engineered into the rails of new digital payment systems.
The future of money is no longer paper. Nor is it even traditional electronic rails; it’s digital. From stablecoins to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised deposits, multiple forms of digital money are emerging all at once. Each promising speed, efficiency and innovation, but each evolving under different rules and carrying very different risks.
Swift’s recent move to pilot a shared blockchain-based ledger underlines how urgent this transition has become. Even the most established networks are racing to re-engineer the foundations of cross-border payments. But building new rails does not automatically deliver trust. Without safeguards built in, the industry risks creating speed without stability.
That’s why growth itself becomes the test: will digital money scale in a way that strengthens resilience and confidence, or simply accelerate risk?
The cracks in the system
The reality of digital money today is fragmentation. Stablecoins, CBDCs and tokenised deposits are developing in parallel, each governed by different rules and regulatory frameworks. Most stablecoins and other digital currencies are privately issued, designed to compete rather than cooperate, while tokenised deposits remain tied to banks. The result is less a unified network than a patchwork of competing systems – and patchwork creates weak links.
Those weak links are where criminals thrive. If one network enforces strict anti-money laundering (AML) rules while another takes a lighter touch, illicit funds will simply flow through the weaker channel. This is not a new tactic either: criminals have always exploited gaps between jurisdictions. But in a fragmented digital payments ecosystem, those gaps now multiply across both borders and protocols. The World Economic Forum has already warned that a lack of interoperability is slowing fintech innovations like tokenisation. The same lack of coordination that leaves regulators with blind spots and criminals with openings.
That’s why interoperability has shifted to the forefront and is now a systemic requirement. Payment networks that cannot share standards or data leave entire stretches of the value chain vulnerable. Swift’s own experiments in blockchain interoperability underline this: without consistency in governance and messaging, digital money cannot coexist securely. And without that consistency, speed and programmability don’t represent progress; they represent acceleration of risk.
At the same time, fraud threats are evolving in step with innovation. Studies into CBDCs and tokenised assets point to new attack vectors on the rise, from phishing of digital wallets to counterfeiting tokens. But the bigger risk is systemic: when digital money, in whatever form, can move instantly across multiple rails, detection becomes harder while the attack surface widens. The very qualities that make digital money attractive – immediacy, global reach, programmability – become the very qualities criminals can exploit in the absence of safeguards.
Which is why compliance isn’t a question mark hanging over digital money; it’s the only way it can succeed. Without embedded safeguards, fragmentation won’t just slow progress; it will actively undermine it.
Building safeguards into the fabric of digital money
Compliance in digital money is not about restricting choice or slowing innovation. It’s about embedding trust into the system itself, ensuring that customers, banks and economies can rely on these new forms of value to move safely, securely and profitably across borders. Trust, not speed alone, is the ultimate measure of success here.
This means building safeguards into the transaction layer, not adding them after the fact. Fraud detection, AML and sanctions intelligence are not parallel processes, but interlocking defences. Together, they define the “trust architecture” that will determine whether digital money can scale.
Fraud detection provides the first signal of weakness in the system. As rails become faster and more programmable, fraud risks multiply – and only adaptive monitoring can keep pace. Systems must learn from new typologies, spot anomalies across rails and apply behavioural analysis to flag patterns early. Fraud detection, in this context, becomes the early-warning radar of digital money, identifying issues before they cascade.
AML takes that further, providing the systemic view. Instant transfers across CBDCs, stablecoins and tokenised deposits create new blind spots unless compliance teams can consolidate data across them. A unified view of risk means connecting transaction histories, counterparties and behaviours into a single environment, so investigators can see the whole picture rather than isolated fragments. Only interoperability can turn AML into a living, breathing system, ensuring illicit flows can’t hide in the seams between different rails.
Sanctions intelligence is then the geopolitical anchor. As lists shift in response to conflicts and crises, screening must go beyond simple list-matching to identify hidden ownership structures and indirect links. This becomes especially critical in a world where privately issued and state-backed currencies coexist, offering multiple routes for value to move. If sanctions controls can’t reach across all those routes, they become the very channels exploited for illicit finance.
Taken together, these safeguards form the foundation of trust in digital money. Fraud detection, AML and sanctions intelligence define what it means to build payments systems that are safe by design. Not safe in the sense of slow or restrictive, but safe in the sense of resilient, scalable and aligned with the future of digital payments.
The future of digital money
The design choices made today, while these systems are still being built, will define the future of money. Get them right, and digital money can deliver confidence and growth. Get them wrong, and fragmentation, fraud and financial crime will erode the very benefits these innovations promise.
At the centre of those choices is compliance. Far from stifling innovation, it’s the architecture that makes innovation sustainable. It ensures that speed does not outpace security, and that growth is built on trust.
But no institution can achieve this alone. Banks, regulators and technology providers must co-create the frameworks that embed these safeguards from the start. Only by working together can the industry build networks that are not just faster and more efficient, but trusted by everyone who relies on them. After all, embedding compliance within the design of digital money is not about slowing the future of payments, it’s simply about making that future sustainable.