For years, the goal of global payments has been simple: connect companies to more railways. The supply has always been fast, lower cost and wider range. The problem was access.
Now access is no longer an issue. The problem is what to do with it all.
Cross-border businesses can now choose between local payment methods, real-time payment networks, correspondent banking, stablecoins, and a growing range of digital settlement mechanisms. Each promises improvements in speed, cost, or reach. Each also presents its own compliance burden.
As Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS, noted during a recent conversation with OpenPayd CEO Ayana DimitrovaThe companies find themselves “merging banks, FX providers, payment rails, and now cryptocurrencies on and off ramps,” each shouldering their own integration and compliance burden. The result is an infrastructure puzzle that companies were never meant to solve alone.
This is the opening that OpenPayd seeks to achieve. The London-based financial infrastructure company offers a single integration that links accounts payable, foreign exchange, domestic and cross-border payments, treasury services and digital asset capabilities. Its argument is that the complexity of modern payments infrastructure has become a business problem, not just a technical problem, and that coordination is the solution.
“It’s not the job of companies to think about infrastructure payments and to think about regulation,” she told Webster. “They need to focus on what they do best, which is developing and selling their products and services.”
Historically, Dimitrova said, coordination meant channeling payments through different providers to improve licensing rates or reduce costs. The definition is expanding. Today, she said, it describes the mechanism by which companies access a range of payment types without managing each individually.
“We choose, dynamically and in real time, the most appropriate channel for that money movement,” Dimitrova told Webster.
Standards change with every transaction.
“It might be speed. It might be cost. It might be acceptance rate,” she explained.
In practice, this means that a single payment may travel through a local clearing system in one market, traditional banking methods in another, and stablecoin infrastructure in a third.
Token deposits, stablecoins and the issue of liquidity
Major banks evaluate token deposits. Stablecoins are finding a foothold in cross-border trade. Payments companies continue to invest in infrastructure that links traditional banking systems with blockchain-based networks. Every development raises the same question: Will one model replace the others?
Dimitrova doesn’t think so. She said the future depends heavily on interoperability.
“We are all, in some way, competing with each other for a share of the global money movement, but we complement each other just as much,” she said.
This framing helps explain why many infrastructure providers now describe themselves as agnostic to rail. Businesses care about timing, certainty and access to funds. The technology underlying any transaction is often secondary.
The conversation also looked to what Dimitrova called the next frontier: independent commerce.
“We will see fully programmable and autonomous payment instructions,” Dimitrova predicted. As Webster said, “Trust builds over time because you see money moving in a certain way between certain buyers and sellers.”
The willingness of companies to delegate routing decisions today may lay the foundation for fully automated commerce tomorrow.
The discussion comes as OpenPayd seeks to list on the Nasdaq through a SPAC transaction. Dimitrova described the move as part of the next phase of the company’s growth, providing broader access to capital markets as the business expands.
a witness Full interview With Iana Dimitrova to learn more about:
- Why Dimitrova believes regulatory licensing remains one of the industry’s most enduring competitive advantages.
- How does OpenPayd fare when the stablecoin route is preferred over traditional banking infrastructure?
- What might the mix of fiat currencies, stablecoins and token deposits look like five years from now?
