Jul 7, 2026 · 26 min · 10 segments
As digital commerce becomes increasingly global and always-on, traditional payment infrastructure is struggling to keep pace. A new generation of programmable settlement networks is emerging to enable…
Richard AstleGuest
Oliver SmithHost
What is fundamentally broken about that model in 2026? And why are we seeing this really urgent push towards networked, real-time
settlement today? The baseline of all of this is that we've had the internet for the past 30 years or so.
So it was almost inevitable if you're going to have this open internet that you need to be able to have money that moves at that same speed.
And if my bank doesn't have a correspondent banking relationship where I want to send money cross border, that introduces a lot of friction.
So it's often you'll see four, five, six hops, and it's just messages bouncing back and forth between different banks.
Um, it's also quite a liquidity trap, you know, because of the sort of the nostro vostro relationships between the different, uh, correspondence.
Um, and we've talked about this and a lot of people have talked about it here at the event, you know, of how much liquidity is actually trapped in, in the system from that, from that relationship.
We're now in a position where we do have money that can move at the speed of the internet through the form of stable coins.
So this sort of outdated infrastructure will go through a refresh and it's not an either or.
We're looking at more of a new rail for settlement that's going to be faster and more in real time.
You've talked about moving from bilateral relationships to this more networked infrastructure.
Can you paint us a picture, I guess, of what does that actually mean in practice? How does that networked model change the way that a bank or a payment provider thinks about moving money compared with their traditional correspondent banking relationships? So delve into that in a bit
What is fundamentally broken about that model in 2026? And why are we seeing this really urgent push towards networked, real-time
settlement today? The baseline of all of this is that we've had the internet for the past 30 years or so.
So it was almost inevitable if you're going to have this open internet that you need to be able to have money that moves at that same speed.
And if my bank doesn't have a correspondent banking relationship where I want to send money cross border, that introduces a lot of friction.
So it's often you'll see four, five, six hops, and it's just messages bouncing back and forth between different banks.
Um, it's also quite a liquidity trap, you know, because of the sort of the nostro vostro relationships between the different, uh, correspondence.
Um, and we've talked about this and a lot of people have talked about it here at the event, you know, of how much liquidity is actually trapped in, in the system from that, from that relationship.
We're now in a position where we do have money that can move at the speed of the internet through the form of stable coins.
So this sort of outdated infrastructure will go through a refresh and it's not an either or.
We're looking at more of a new rail for settlement that's going to be faster and more in real time.
You've talked about moving from bilateral relationships to this more networked infrastructure.
Can you paint us a picture, I guess, of what does that actually mean in practice? How does that networked model change the way that a bank or a payment provider thinks about moving money compared with their traditional correspondent banking relationships? So delve into that in a bit
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