Why the next revolution in finance isn’t a rail. it’s a bridge
What the global economy needs now are bridges
What the global economy needs now are bridgesThe payments industry prides itself on ‘rails’, the secure, dependable conduits that move money from A to Z. But rails alone, domestic, national and corporate are no longer enough. What the global economy now needs are bridges’, interoperable, trust-anchored links that stitch those rails into a single, fluid fabric of value movement. Until we build those ‘bridges’ capital will remain too slow, too costly and too fragmented for future trade and commerce
The scale of the problem is stark. The global payments ecosystem handled trillions of transactions worth quadrillions of dollars in recent years. A plumbing system whose sheer size masks deep inefficiencies and fragmentation. Yet users still pay for that fragmentation. World Bank data tracking remittance and retail corridors shows average retail remittance costs remain stubbornly high.
Why bridges, not new rails?
Because building yet another global rail is unnecessary. The next revolution is interoperability. An architectural shift that lets national real-time systems, correspondent banking, card networks, stablecoins and novel settlement utilities talk the same language and honour common trust frameworks.
The Bank for International Settlements and CPMI’s work on payment statistics and interoperability repeatedly shows growth in real-time domestic systems, but also the yawning gap between domestic speed and cross-border delivery.
We should be clear though bridging requires expertise, innovation and experience.
It requires reconciling legal doctrines, regulatory expectations and commercial incentives that evolved in siloed national markets. But technology is outpacing policy and the longer we wait to codify interoperable trust frameworks, the longer costs and frictions will be borne by the most vulnerable users. The alternative in an ever-proliferating set of rails each claiming universality, is a world of parallel islands where value is expensive to move and innovation is localized.
The future of global finance will not be decided by the next single rail. It will be decided by how fast and how faithfully we build the bridges between them. The governance, standards and liquidity mechanisms that let money flow with the speed and certainty markets now expect.
Get that right, and we will have turned fragmentation into fluidity. Get it wrong and the global payments landscape will remain a map of high-cost and slow corridors while commerce races ahead.
