When times get tough, payments need to get easier. That was the case in 2025 for cross-border payments.
In a year marked by geopolitical uncertainty, supply-chain reconfiguration and persistent pressure on margins, the mechanics of moving money across borders moved squarely into the strategic spotlight for businesses looking to both grow internationally and maintain their global presences.
What emerged was not a single breakthrough technology, but a new operating model of multi-rail, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven payment orchestration.
Banks, FinTechs and corporates stopped debating which rail would “win” cross-border payments. Instead, they built systems to use all of them, spanning cards, ACH, real-time payment networks, local clearing systems, alternative payment methods (APMs) and, in specific corridors, blockchain-based settlement.
After all, the past year was marked by tariff turbulence, volatile demand and tighter working capital conditions. Faster, more predictable cross-border payments in this context can translate directly into competitive advantage. The unsung hero of this transformation was orchestration: the intelligence layer that made complexity manageable and turned fragmented infrastructure into a streamlined transaction flow.
See also: How the Consumerization of X-Border Payments Is Reshaping Corporate Treasury
Orchestration Moves to the Center of Global Payments
Cross-border payments sit at the intersection of regulation, banking legacy and global fragmentation. Even large multinationals with strong banking relationships face opaque pricing structures and limited visibility into end-to-end costs. Smaller and mid-market firms fare worse, often absorbing higher FX markups and intermediary fees in exchange for basic access.
CFOs have spent years optimizing spend management, forecasting, and reporting. Payments, by contrast, have lagged. That gap is now widening as expectations for real-time visibility and control collide with decades-old infrastructure.
Orchestration is becoming increasingly important as payment landscapes fragment. Cards remain dominant in some markets, while APMs like bank transfers, mobile money or QR-based systems lead in others. Platforms, such as digital wallets, that integrate these options behind a single interface can reduce complexity for finance teams while improving reach.
“A significant use case for wallet payments is within our Banks sector, where many banks are heavily investing in enhancing their remittances offering,” Emanuela Saccarola, Citi’s head of Cross-Border Payments, Services, told PYMNTS, adding that banks highly value the ability to pay into wallets, alongside cross-border instant payments and payments into cards.
“Globally, broader interoperability must be a key priority,” Saccarola added, noting that the race now is to provide access to these systems from a cross-border perspective so that payments providers can connect those domestic systems into a global grid, one that can operate around the clock.
For CFOs, optionality translates into leverage. It creates negotiating power with banks and payment providers. It enables rapid entry into new markets without rebuilding infrastructure. And it supports resilience when specific rails experience outages or regulatory disruption.
Read more: Why Time to Cash Is New Benchmark for Cross-Border B2B Growth
The Impact of Better Data on Cross-Border Commerce
As the orchestration layer of platforms and bank networks helped process more transactions, a flywheel effect emerged throughout 2025. More volume generated more data; more data improved AI models; better models delivered higher success rates and lower costs; those outcomes can attract more volume.
Structured data is set to amplify this effect. The transition to the richer, XML-based ISO 20022 format for global payments is poised to feed analytics engines that can identify new optimization opportunities, from corridor-specific pricing to predictive liquidity management.
A payment initiated as an ISO 20022 message can be dynamically mapped to a real-time rail in one market, a local clearing system in another, or even a wallet-based payout, all without losing data fidelity. That matters because orchestration increasingly depends on nuance: settlement speed versus cost, compliance friction versus customer experience, and liquidity impact versus FX exposure.
In this context, payments innovation becomes less about launching new rails and more about extracting intelligence from existing ones.
A PYMNTS Intelligence report, “The Treasury Management Playbook: Spotlight on Cross-Border Payments” found cross-border payments are more important than ever and that companies are looking to minimize the frictions associated with international transactions.
In an uncertain year, efficiency became a strategic imperative. Multi-rail access provided the raw materials. AI provided the intelligence. But orchestration, the ability to bring it all together coherently, reliably and at scale, may have been the true star of 2025.
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