Banks and FinTechs Are Unbundling the Cross-Border Stack

After all, they might be.

Visa, for example, joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BLOOM initiative Tuesday (Aug. 25), adding another global payments heavyweight to an experiment designed to connect traditional payment systems with stablecoin-based settlement rails. Participants already include banks and infrastructure providers such as DBS, OCBC, UOB, Partior, Circle and Stripe, and Visa’s plans include testing settlement using regulated dollar- and euro-denominated stablecoins, such as whether institutions can settle seven days a week rather than around the banking calendar.

Also on Tuesday, OpenPayd integrated its universal financial infrastructure with Circle Payments Network (CPN), enabling businesses to make near-instant cross-border fiat payments, OpenPayd said in a Tuesday (Aug. 25) press release. Elsewhere, Project Agorá is testing tokenized commercial bank deposits against tokenized central bank reserves across currencies. Project Pangea is exploring real-time stablecoin-based FX settlement between Europe and Korea, while Qivalis now brings together 37 European banks behind a regulated euro stablecoin, and Korea’s UniKA is organizing banks on the other side of that corridor.

All of this is happening while BLOOM, for its part, is deliberately testing how tokenized bank liabilities, regulated stablecoins and existing payment networks can coexist. For corporate treasurers, another stablecoin pilot is not the interesting part. It is whether the networks carrying these new forms of money will actually talk to one another.

Read more: Stablecoin Pilots Keep Stalling on the Road to Scale 

The Cross-Border Stablecoin Question Is Becoming an Interoperability Question

A multinational doesn’t ultimately care whether the technology underneath a $20 million supplier payment is intellectually elegant. It cares whether value can move from the company’s bank in New York to a supplier’s account in Seoul at the right time, in the right currency, with final settlement, regulatory certainty, sufficient liquidity and usable transaction information.

That requires more than issuing a token. It requires conversion, FX, compliance, liquidity, settlement and connectivity. Visa’s arrival to the BLOOM project pushes the question one step further: what happens when a global network built around conventional payments becomes a bridge into tokenized settlement rather than being replaced by it?

Project Pangea offers another useful clue. The initiative is testing whether foreign exchange between stablecoin ecosystems can move from today’s settlement model toward T+0. The real bottleneck in cross-border digital money appears when one digital currency needs to become another. The commercial value for multinational treasury emerges when digital euros can become digital dollars without recreating the same FX, liquidity and settlement frictions that exist in correspondent banking today.

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The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Cross-Border Opportunity: How Payments Innovation Can Help SMBs Go Global” found in May that while traditional banks remain the dominant provider for international payments, FinTech companies are steadily expanding their role by combining faster digital experiences with services designed for businesses navigating global trade. Rather than replacing banks, many small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) appear to be building a broader payments tool kit as international commerce becomes more common.

See also: Currency Just Became Treasury’s Newest Superpower 

The New Cross-Border Finance Stack Is Unbundling Across Corridors

The emerging landscape suggests that functions bundled together inside correspondent banking may begin separating into distinct competitive layers. In an operational sense, the cross-border payment may become less a product itself than an orchestrated sequence of financial services.

This has implications for banks because, in today’s model, the institution holding the corporate relationship often controls much of the journey. In an interoperable environment, the institution holding the deposit does not necessarily have to own the FX, routing or settlement layer.

As Biswarup Chatterjee, global head of partnerships and innovation, Citi Services at Citi, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in December, blockchain is not replacing traditional financial infrastructure, but rather being folded into it.

“What really excited us is the fact that we are able to integrate [blockchain] into our operating model … create a 24/7, always-on, on-demand ecosystem for our clients,” Chatterjee said. “But the key word is integration.”

That makes three questions important for CFOs: Can the asset move beyond its issuing institution? Can it become another currency efficiently? And can the resulting transaction plug directly into existing treasury, accounting and liquidity workflows?

Still, “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the March installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, showed that most middle market companies remain cautious about digital assets. Usage is limited, with 13% of firms using stablecoins and 5% employing other cryptocurrencies.

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