Over the past year, I’ve had countless conversations with treasury and payment teams at major banks, and I’m often asked the same question: how do we compete with wallet-native fintechs on cross-border payments? But as I tell these teams, this isn’t the right question to be asking anymore. Banks no longer need to play catch-up; now they can play to win.
It starts with Swift’s payments scheme: the rulebook, built with more than sixty banks, that commits participants to full-value delivery, upfront fee and FX transparency, and end-to-end tracking on international transfers. It’s already live across major corridors.
And now the real-time domestic rails banks already use to move money instantly within a country are being extended to handle the cross-border leg of a transaction too. Together, banks can extend their reach into digital wallets across the globe by connecting to networks that already exist, rather than building new ones from scratch.
That reach matters well beyond the traditional remittance corridors most people still picture when they think about cross-border payments. While global remittances represent huge sums of money ($905 billion in 2024, according to World Bank estimates – up 4.6% on the previous year), they are no longer the whole picture.
Increasingly, the volumes crossing borders come from businesses paying each other, platforms paying creators and freelancers, and small firms invoicing overseas customers directly. Every one of those flows still needs to arrive somewhere the customer trusts, and that is where banks already hold five advantages that fintechs cannot easily replicate.
Rather than worrying about being outmaneuvered by fintechs, I challenge you to think about the advantages you already have. So, here’s a better question: which of these will you put to work first?
The account relationship starts and ends with you
Every cross-border payment revolves into an account somewhere, and for the majority of consumer and business transactions, that account sits with a bank. Fintechs and wallet providers can originate volume, but at some point, in the chain, funds still land in a regulated deposit account banks already hold.
What has changed is the ability to extend that advantage outward: connecting existing account infrastructure directly to wallets and local schemes elsewhere, rather than routing through a chain of correspondents to get there.
Holding the funds is what holding trust means
In the customer experience at a bank, whoever holds the funds determines whether a payment arrives intact or arrives short, deduction by deduction, across a chain of intermediaries.
Swift’s payments scheme commits participants to delivering the full value of a payment with no deductions along the way. Banks are the natural home for that commitment because they already hold the funds under direct regulatory oversight, rather than passing them through intermediaries without transparency.
Supervision and regulatory oversight are what customers are already paying for
Banks operate inside some of the most heavily supervised frameworks in financial services, and that supervision is precisely what customers are buying when they choose a bank for a cross-border payment.
Combined with the move to ISO 20022 messaging, now the mandatory standard for cross-border payment instructions, which carries richer, more structured data through CBPR+, banks can now show customers more of what is happening to a payment in transit, not less, under the FATF travel rule being applied.
No fintech or wallet provider can replicate the confidence that comes from being the regulated counterparty in the chain and the enforceability of the FATF travel rule.
Trust built over decades cannot be matched and built in months
For high-value corporate and SME flows, trust is the existing product offering, and it does not transfer easily to a newer entrant, however good its infrastructure. That matters more, not less, as the flows crossing borders diversify: SMEs trading directly with overseas buyers, gig workers and independent creators paid from platforms based in another country, and B2B and B2C commerce settling at volumes few payment providers were built to handle a decade ago.
Every one of those flows still needs a bank willing to stand behind it. Banks that have already spent decades building that trust are better placed to extend it into these newer categories than to concede them.
Only the bank can control and own the whole journey, start to finish
Real-time domestic rails are now reaching for the border. The Clearing House’s RTP network, for example, is targeting September 2026 to support correspondent bank activity for one-leg-out international payments, giving banks a way to originate the domestic leg of a cross-border transaction on infrastructure they already use daily.
Bank of America has already announced a cross-border real-time payments service built on Swift and its own CashPro platform. Neither move required building new global rails from scratch. Both give the bank full visibility and control from origination to final credit, a position no correspondent chain or third-party wallet provider can offer in the same way.
None of this is guaranteed, and none of it is evenly distributed. Community and regional banks without the scale of a Bank of America face a real cost to adopting real-time and ISO 20022-native infrastructure, and regulatory harmonization across corridors remains uneven even as individual schemes go live.
The advantage described here is available to banks that choose to invest in using it. It is not conferred automatically by size or incumbency alone.
Banks already have most of what this moment requires: the accounts, the funds, the regulation, the trust, and now the connectivity to reach beyond their own rails. What happens next depends on who decides to use it.
The opportunity is clear: Banks have all the foundational strengths to capture the rapidly growing real-time cross border payments-to-wallets market. By combining their established customer base with modern payment networks with the SWIFT scheme solution, banks can transform cross-border payments into a faster, more accessible, compliant, and customer-centric experience.
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