Most people don’t think about how money moves across borders. You tap your card on vacation or wire a supplier overseas and assume it works the same everywhere; fast and invisible. Beneath the surface, though, global payments remain slow, costly, and overly dependent on a single hub: New York.
The reason is correspondent banking, the plumbing of international finance built for a different era. Instead of funds moving directly from one country to another, a bank relies on an intermediary, often a U.S. bank in New York, to provide services on its behalf. That made sense when technology was limited and trust was scarcer. Today, it has become a bottleneck.
Consider a business in Nairobi paying a supplier in Berlin. The transaction typically detours through a U.S. correspondent bank before reaching Germany. That extra leg adds time, fees, and operational risk—even when neither party has any commercial tie to the United States. If the same flight path were imposed on travel—Kenya to New York to Germany—we’d call it inefficient design. Yet we accept similar friction for the world’s financial arteries. In most markets, I can send money to a friend instantly or summon an Uber to my door in minutes. Global payments should run at the speed of modern software.
