What banks already have that fintechs can't replicate in cross-border payments

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.