Banks have spent the past decade adding more payment capability. Real-time domestic rails have proliferated. Cross-border payment connectivity is expanding. ISO 20022 is creating richer and more standardised data. Alternative payment channels continue to emerge. In many markets, the infrastructure story is no longer about access. Yet a harder commercial question is taking shape.

More payment capability does not automatically produce better economics. In some institutions, the opposite is true. More rails can mean duplicated operations, fragmented compliance processes, weaker visibility, slower decision-making and rising operational cost.

That was the sharper concern running through a transaction banking and payments roundtable at The Asian Banker Summit 2026, which brought together senior leaders from Affin Bank, Baiduri Bank, Deutsche Bank, ZA Bank, Hong Leong Bank, Security Bank Philippines, Bank of America, BNY, CIMB, Standard Chartered, MUFG, Global IME Bank and ACI Worldwide.

The discussion moved quickly beyond infrastructure modernisation as a technology conversation. The more important question was operating model design. As payment ecosystems become more fragmented yet increasingly interconnected, how should banks organise payments in a way that improves control, customer outcomes and return on infrastructure investment?

For some institutions, particularly large global banks, some form of centralised payment orchestration or hub capability is already a practical necessity. For others, the challenge is how to modernise selectively without creating another expensive transformation cycle. The debate was less about whether consolidation makes sense, and more about what form it should take.

Security Bank offered a particularly useful practical counterpoint. Its payment hub implementation reflected a real-world example of how centralising payment operations can shift the discussion from architecture towards operating efficiency, stronger visibility and economic discipline. The nine-month deployment also demonstrated how complex implementations can reach the market quickly when powered by a modular solution.

Fragmentation is no longer merely inefficient. It is economically corrosive

One of the strongest points of agreement was that fragmentation is no longer simply a technology inconvenience. It is becoming an economic drag.

Banks increasingly operate across domestic instant payment schemes, high-value settlement systems, card ecosystems, correspondent networks, cross-border infrastructures and emerging digital payment channels. These often evolved independently, with separate ownership structures, workflows, compliance processes and operational teams.

Mark Looi, director of new business, Southeast Asia, at ACI Worldwide, argued that many institutions still lack a genuinely centralised payments operating environment, leaving visibility and control fragmented across systems and business units. That view resonated strongly.

Fragmentation creates duplicated controls, inconsistent customer experiences, slower response times, more exception handling and weaker routing intelligence. Payment events entering through different channels may trigger entirely different workflows, even where the economic purpose is identical.

For smaller and regional institutions, this becomes especially expensive. Supporting multiple infrastructures without scale discipline can quickly erode returns.

The issue is no longer infrastructure access. It is infrastructure economics. Banks operating multiple payment rails without orchestration typically experience higher exception volumes and slower onboarding timelines, which delays revenue from new payment capabilities.

Global scale creates both strength and burden

One of the more nuanced tensions in the discussion was that fragmentation is experienced very differently depending on institutional scale. For large global banks, complexity is often unavoidable.

Supporting multiple domestic schemes, correspondent infrastructures, cross-border connectivity initiatives and overlapping regulatory frameworks creates a far heavier operating burden than that faced by regionally concentrated institutions.

One global banking perspective raised a particularly important concern: regulatory asymmetry is not merely geographical. Institutional payment businesses are sometimes required to adapt to controls or implementation models shaped by retail payments logic, even where customer needs and risk profiles differ materially.

That makes operating model design much harder.

Banks often plan infrastructure investment through multi-year cycles, while regulatory mandates can emerge on much shorter timelines, forcing reactive reprioritisation.

Yet scale also creates advantages.

For global institutions, the complexity itself increasingly makes centralised orchestration economically rational.

For regional and domestic institutions, the calculation is less obvious. The complexity burden may be lower, but so is the margin for inefficient investment.

The operating model question is therefore not identical across banks. The economics differ materially by scale. Connectivity improves customer outcomes, but not necessarily operating simplicity.

The discussion was not uniformly pessimistic.

There was clear recognition that regional payment connectivity is improving.

Cross-border retail payment linkages, faster payment interoperability initiatives and common messaging standards are beginning to produce visibly better customer outcomes in selected corridors, particularly in retail cross-border payments and remittances.

A Southeast Asian banking perspective pointed to the practical progress being made, where payment experiences that were once fragmented and cumbersome are becoming materially easier for end users.

That practical experience reinforced the point that modernisation can deliver meaningful improvements when infrastructure, operating design and customer journeys are aligned. But convergence does not reduce complexity equally.

For globally active institutions, the same connectivity initiatives that simplify customer journeys can create additional routing, liquidity, screening and compliance burdens behind the scenes. Each new connectivity layer creates operational consequences.

That is where ISO 20022 surfaced as one of the more strategically important themes in the discussion.

Several participants saw richer structured payment data as one of the industry’s most constructive developments. Better standardisation can improve compliance screening, reduce false positives, strengthen fraud detection, improve routing intelligence and create more coherent interoperability across schemes and markets. But ISO 20022 is an enabler, not a solution by itself.

A richer data standard only improves outcomes if institutions have an operating model capable of using that data consistently across payment environments.

That is why standardisation and orchestration increasingly need to be viewed together.

Stablecoins may add another rail, not remove complexity

The discussion also touched on an emerging question that sits just beyond today’s mainstream operating models: what happens when new payment rails are no longer bank-native?
Stablecoins remain at an early stage in institutional payments, but they increasingly matter as a strategic consideration because they challenge a familiar assumption — that payments modernisation will occur primarily through existing banking infrastructure.

In theory, stablecoins offer attractive possibilities. Always-on settlement, programmable payment logic, reduced dependency on traditional correspondent chains and potentially faster cross-border execution make them difficult to dismiss, particularly in use cases where legacy infrastructure remains slow or expensive.

But from an operating model perspective, they do not simplify the problem.

They introduce another settlement rail, another liquidity environment, another compliance framework and another orchestration challenge.

For globally active institutions already managing fragmented payment ecosystems, adding digital settlement rails may increase complexity rather than reduce it, at least in the medium term.

The more relevant strategic question is not whether stablecoins replace existing infrastructure.

It is whether banks can build operating models flexible enough to coordinate conventional rails, regional connectivity schemes and emerging digital settlement mechanisms within a coherent control framework.

If stablecoins become commercially relevant in transaction banking, the orchestration challenge only becomes more demanding.

Not every payment business is solving for speed

One of the more useful correctives in the discussion challenged the increasingly simplistic assumption that payments modernisation means making everything faster. That may be true in retail.

Retail customers increasingly expect immediacy as baseline functionality. Faster domestic payments and improved cross-border experiences are rapidly becoming standard expectations.

But wholesale and institutional businesses often optimise for different outcomes.

For treasury teams, predictability, settlement certainty, control and approval discipline may matter more than immediacy. A useful point surfaced in the discussion: friction is not always failure.

Retail customers generally dislike friction because it delays transactions. Institutional environments may deliberately preserve forms of friction because those controls serve governance and risk purposes.

Always-on payments also create real operating implications. Treasury workflows, approval structures, liquidity management and internal control models may all require redesign.

That distinction matters because a payment hub or orchestration model cannot simply optimise for speed. It must support multiple operating logics.

Fraud defence is becoming an operating design challenge

Fraud was one of the most commercially important parts of the discussion. Synthetic media, AI-generated impersonation and increasingly credible social engineering are changing the nature of payment fraud risk.

One example discussed involved payment instructions appearing to come from known senior executives, reinforced by convincing voice replication and fabricated urgency, making traditional human verification significantly less reliable. The threat is technological, but also behavioural.

Hierarchical organisational cultures may make urgent executive instructions less likely to be challenged, increasing vulnerability to sophisticated impersonation attacks.

Askari Brown, head of solutions consulting, Asia Pacific, at ACI Worldwide, argued that fraud management is becoming less about downstream exception handling and more about stronger control design upstream. This represents a shift in the operating model, requiring institutions to realign organisationally to support AI-enabled modern technology platforms, while keeping human-centered decision-making at the forefront.

In fragmented payment environments, fraud signals may remain trapped inside individual systems. A centralised operating layer creates the possibility of more consistent controls, richer data visibility and faster anomaly detection across payment types. Fraud defence is increasingly becoming an argument for operational consolidation.

The payment hub is becoming an operating model, not just a platform

One of the most important ideas in the discussion was orchestration. Shaun Wong, head of Malaysia and Indonesia at ACI Worldwide, argued that the real challenge is no longer simply enabling payment capability, but coordinating increasingly interconnected payment environments intelligently. Doing so, he argued, requires central orchestration through a centralised payment hub. That distinction matters. A payment hub should not be understood merely as another infrastructure layer. Its strategic role is becoming broader.

It increasingly functions as the operating model through which banks decide how payment instructions are received, enriched, screened, routed, repaired, settled, monitored and analysed across multiple infrastructures. That is materially different from simply adding connectivity.

A more coherent operating layer can improve straight-through processing, reduce exception handling, improve routing economics and create more consistent customer outcomes. That is where the return on investment conversation becomes much more tangible.

The economics of traditional correspondent payment models are also under increasing pressure from customer expectations shaped by lower-cost fintech alternatives and greater pricing transparency. That creates pressure not only on fee economics, but on routing logic and legacy operating assumptions. The issue is no longer technology modernisation for its own sake. It is whether operating consolidation creates measurable leverage.

The next payments divide will be economic, not technological

Banks are not losing access to payment infrastructure. If anything, infrastructure access continues expanding. But infrastructure alone no longer creates advantage.

The more important divide may emerge between institutions that continue managing payments through fragmented operating structures, and those that turn orchestration, standardisation and operating consolidation into measurable economic advantage.

The strategic divide will not be between banks with access to modern payment rails and those without. It will be between those that convert complexity into operating leverage, and those overwhelmed by it.

The strategic question is no longer whether payments are modernising, but whether banks can coordinate across rails with consistent visibility, control and decision-making. Those that can will be best positioned to turn growing complexity into competitive advantage.