The Price of Connection: What It Actually Takes to Build Cross-Border Payment Cooperation

Every institution talks about the need for interoperability but few speak honestly about what it actually costs, in regulation, in pricing, and in the multilateral negotiation it takes to connect one country's payment system to another's. This panel brings together the messaging networks, reserve-pooling mechanisms, national schemes and multilateral hubs doing this work in practice, to work through the frictions: which regulatory frameworks still block genuine interoperability, how the economics of a cross-border link actually get split between the parties that build and operate it, and what a smaller or newer market needs in place before it can plug into a bigger one.

This panel aims to present a grounded view of where multilateral payment cooperation is actually working today, what it costs to get there and dive deeper into whether the real barrier to cross-border payment connectivity is technical, regulatory or commercial.