"Banks need to stop thinking of themselves as train operators and start thinking of themselves as air traffic controllers," says Patricia Sullivan, Global Head of Institutional Cash Management, Deutsche Bank. 

Speaking in the opening session of the Euro Banking Association’s EBAday 2026 in Copenhagen, Sullivan argued that the future of payments is no longer about owning a single rail or directing traffic down a predetermined route. Instead, banks will increasingly be required to coordinate activity across multiple networks, payment methods and forms of money simultaneously – not unlike the more invisible work of the air traffic controller, safely orchestrating aircraft with different destinations, priorities and flight paths. 

“The institutions best positioned for the future will not necessarily be those that own every network, but those that can intelligently route transactions, manage risk across ecosystems, optimise liquidity and deliver actionable insights to clients regardless of which rail is used,” added Sullivan.

EBAday in Copenhagen

For decades, correspondent banking has operated on a set of assumptions now being challenged. As panellists at the Correspondent Banking in 2026 and Beyond session discussed, pressures around availability, trust and revenue models are forcing the industry to rethink how cross-border payments are delivered.

A major force behind this shift is the rapid rise of domestic real-time payment systems. By making instant settlement, transparency and account validation feel standard, they are raising expectations among consumers and corporates alike: cross-border payments should be just as fast, clear and reliable.

As a result, attention is turning to how these domestic investments can be extended internationally. This includes initiatives such as real-time payment system interlinking and one leg out schemes, such as the EPC's One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer, aka OCT Inst Scheme, launched in November 2023.¹ (For a more detailed description of the different models evolving in this space see ‘What corporate treasurers should know about cross-border instant payments’).

Delivering real-time capabilities at a cross-border level also requires changes to the underlying market infrastructure. “Today, I can send an email at 11pm, but I can't always send a payment due to cut-off times depending on the jurisdiction I’m in,” explained Ciaran Byrne, Global Head of Product and Client Solutions, Institutional Cash Management, Deutsche Bank. “Moving beyond arbitrary cut-off times towards an always-on environment is going to be important for the next stage of correspondent banking.”

Pictured from left to right: Moderator: Gareth Lodge (Celent), Ciaran Byrne (Deutsche Bank), Frank Dehnke (Helaba), Pablo Izquierdo (Bank of America), Marc Pomes Bordedebat (HSBC), Anastasiia Ragimli (Cecabank)

The move towards extended operating hours was highlighted last October in the Financial Stability Board’s G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments: Consolidated progress report for 2025, which identified it as a key enabler to “interlink payment systems across borders, enhance liquidity management, mitigate settlement risk and accelerate cross-border payments”.²

Progress is being made on this front. In October 2025, the US Federal Reserve announced plans to expand the operating days of the Fedwire Funds Service and National Settlement Service to include Sundays and weekday holidays, with implementation expected in 2028 or 2029,³ while in May 2026 the Eurosystem published a roadmap for extending the operating hours of T2, its real-time gross settlement system.⁴

“Just as telecoms moved away from paying by the minute, correspondent banking will need to move beyond deductions and transaction-based fees”
Ciaran Byrne, Global Head of Product and Client Solutions, Institutional Cash Management, Deutsche Bank

Alongside speed, the economics of correspondent banking are also coming under scrutiny. “Just as telecoms moved away from paying by the minute, correspondent banking will need to move beyond deductions and transaction-based fees towards more transparent subscription-style models,” said Byrne. “It simply won’t be accepted as these new ways of working emerge.”

Initiatives such as Swift's newly launched retail payment scheme, which provides upfront fee transparency and guaranteed full-value delivery, are increasing pressure on traditional pricing models. At the same time, emerging distributed-ledger-based solutions promise to reduce the number of intermediaries involved in a payment transaction, removing some of the fees associated with them altogether (see ‘How Swift is adapting to the changing payments ecosystem’).

Anastasiia Ragimli, Head of International Financial Institutions, Cecabank, reminded her audience that while technology drives speed and automation in cross-border payments, it is still the people, their expertise, and the trusted partnerships between banks that safeguard the system, ensure compliance, and solve critical problems when exceptions arise. “The future is not only about faster payments, but also about safer ones,” she said, describing the example of how institutions across the correspondent banking chain successfully recovered a US$1m payment issued to a fraudster.

However, moving to an always-on and near-real-time environment comes with costs of its own. “Operating around the clock may bring clear advantages, but it also means additional costs, from staffing and fraud management to liquidity funding,” noted a fellow panellist. “We can always add more functionality, but there is a price to pay, and the business case still needs to stack up.”

It is not just the rails that are changing but the way value is represented. A clear sign that digital money is moving from concept to reality in Europe came on 23 June, shortly after EBAday, when the European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee approved the digital euro proposal. While the legislation still needs to be finalised, negotiations between lawmakers, EU member states and the European Commission could begin as early as July, while the ECB is preparing a 12-month pilot in the second half of 2027.⁵

Yet audience polling during the session, The Digital Euro Takes Shape: Promise, Peril and the Path Towards 2029, suggested that many in the industry still remain cautious. More than half of poll respondents (55%) agreed they were waiting for a final political decision before actively preparing for a digital euro, and 54% that they had yet to identify a clear return on investment when it does go ahead.

But what of the other side of the equation – the future of private digital money? This took centre stage in a later session, Digital Assets and Stablecoins – Banking's New Frontier.

Asked why banks are engaging with stablecoins, Dave Birch, Global Ambassador at advisor Consult Hyperion, argued they had little choice but to do so. “Traditional infrastructures separate the movement of information from the movement of value. With stablecoins, the money and the message move together – and the potential efficiency gains are not marginal, they are transformational,” he said.

“For banks, the challenge is not moving a stablecoin technically – it is moving it in a compliant manner”
Manuel Klein, Head of Market Management Payments and Digital Currencies, Deutsche Bank

While panellists agreed with the direction of travel, several of them questioned how quickly such models could be adopted within the realities of the existing financial system. Manuel Klein, Head of Market Management Payments and Digital Currencies at Deutsche Bank noted that, though Europe itself has made significant progress on regulation with the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation,⁶ important challenges remain.

Pictured from left to right: Moderator: Nils Beier (Accenture), Dave Birch (Consult Hyperion), Ollie Carew (NatWest), Damien Godderis (BNP Paribas), Manuel Klein (Deutsche Bank)

"The missing piece is global regulatory alignment. We do not yet have a harmonised framework governing stablecoins and virtual asset service providers across jurisdictions. For banks, the challenge is not moving a stablecoin technically – it is moving it in a compliant manner,” he added.

The respective roles of private and public money were debated quite controversially. While Birch argued that tokenised deposits are "a defensive play by banks", designed to preserve the role of commercial bank money in an increasingly tokenised world, Klein argued that tokenised deposits reflect the practical realities of today’s banking ecosystem: “It’s ultimately trying to replicate the speed of stablecoins in the two-tier monetary system, where you need to always think about the settlement assets, which is central bank money.”

So far, most live implementations of tokenised deposits are focused on specific use cases and limited to book-to-book transfers within a single institution.

That helps explain the industry's growing interest in collaborative initiatives such as the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance-led Project Agorá – a joint effort bringing together commercial banks, clearing banks and central banks to co-design a unified ledger capable of linking tokenised commercial bank deposits with wholesale central bank digital currencies.⁷

The shift towards multiple payment rails ultimately depends on something less visible: the ability to exchange rich, structured data consistently across networks. ISO 20022 serves as that foundation.

Following the end of co-existence in November 2025, 97% of payment instructions are being exchanged in ISO 20022, with only 3% continuing to rely on translation services.⁸ By most measures, the migration has been a success. However, these statistics do not tell the full story, with the industry still some way from fully realising the benefits promised by richer, more structured payment data.

This situation was reflected during the New Horizons for ISO 20022 panel, where audience polling showed that only 39% of respondents agreed they had already observed tangible benefits from ISO 20022, while 45% had not, with the remainder undecided. The reason, panellists argued, is that while the industry has largely completed the technical migration, it is only now beginning the harder task of achieving interoperability and consistent data quality across payment ecosystems.

Pictured from left to right: Moderator: Kjeld Herreman (Paylume), Antoine Cuypers (Vyntra), Karyna Hutarovich (Deutsche Bank), Edward Ireland (Bottomline), Akshat Saharia (HSBC)

One practical example of this, cited by Akshat Saharia, Head of European Cross Border Cross Currency (Interim) and Financial Institutions Payment Products, Global Payments Solutions at HSBC, is the UK, where Faster Payments continue to operate on the ISO 8583 standard while Swift and CHAPS have migrated to ISO 20022. This can result in payments arriving without the structured information expected elsewhere in the payment chain, forcing receiving institutions to enrich or reconstruct data manually.

Even where institutions are speaking the same ISO 20022 language, inconsistencies can persist in how information is captured and interpreted. Karyna Hutarovich, Business Product Specialist at Deutsche Bank, explained that it is "not enough that we all have the same technical standard – what really matters is that we share the same semantics. Are we consistently capturing the right information, in the correct fields? And does that happen across institutions and jurisdictions?"

This challenge – the need for data uplift – is becoming increasingly important as the industry prepares for the next major milestones in the ISO 20022 transition, including the removal of unstructured address formats and the migration of Exceptions and Investigations (E&I) processes – scheduled to take place over the period November 2026 to November 2027.

It is the latter that could bring the most immediate returns, with new ISO 20022 message formats and Swift's Case Orchestrator targeting one of the industry's most costly and manual operational processes (see ‘Guide to ISO 20022 exceptions and investigations (E&I) migration and case orchestration’). Encouragingly, the audience appeared relatively well prepared. When asked to rate their readiness for the E&I migration on a scale of one to five, 63% selected either four or five, while only 8% rated themselves at one or two.

EBAday 2026, the annual summit for payments and transaction banking executives, was held on 16–17 June at the Bella Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sources

¹ See One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer at europeanpaymentscouncil.eu
² See G20 Roadmap for Cross-border Payments: Consolidated progress report for 2025 at fsb.org
³ See Press Release at federalreserve.gov
⁴ See Outcome of the public consultation on the extension of T2 operating hours at ecb.europa.eu
⁵ See Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards at reuters.com
⁶ See Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) at esma.europa.eu
⁷ See Project Agorá at bis.org
⁸ See ISO 20022 CBPR+ Final Adoption Report at swift.com