Cross-border payments are becoming faster, but the infrastructure beneath them is becoming more complicated. Banks now have to navigate traditional correspondent routes, domestic instant-payment systems, real-time gross settlement, digital assets and emerging forms of tokenised money, as expectations move increasingly towards always-on payments.

That creates a different operating problem. More rails give banks and their clients greater choice, but they also add decisions around cost, speed, cut-off times, funding and control. Kevin Flood, Head of International Payments at FIS, sees intelligent orchestration eventually removing more of those decisions from the client.

Flood described a future model in which the user specifies the outcome while the infrastructure determines how best to achieve it. His longer-term idea goes further: intelligence becomes embedded in the payment itself, allowing it to know where it needs to go, select an appropriate rail and potentially handle some exceptions. But Flood repeatedly returned to control: knowing where a payment is, understanding how it was routed and retaining confidence that it reached its intended destination safely.

Speed is raising the requirement for control

Flood said the most visible change among larger transaction banks over the past 12 to 18 months has been the push for faster cross-border payments with greater choice over how a transaction travels. Treasurers want less friction, but they also want to understand their currency exposure and whether a payment could be routed more effectively through a different currency or rail.

The old tolerance for cross-border payments taking three to five days is disappearing as domestic payment systems move towards real time. But Flood does not see speed and control as opposing objectives. Faster payments increase the need for visibility because the window in which a bank can identify and stop a problem is shrinking.

He contrasted older batch-based payment processes, where banks could have days to examine a transaction, with instant rails where the life of a payment may be measured in seconds. Fraud controls designed around the assumption that there is time to intervene therefore become less effective as settlement accelerates.

For Flood, that changes the role of artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics and anomaly detection. They have to identify behaviour or transaction patterns that do not look right before an irrevocable payment is completed.

Flood pointed to a FIS survey of 1,003 consumers in Singapore on banking security and fraud. He used the research to underline the wider risk as payments become faster and harder to reverse: once value has been transferred following a fraudulent instruction, recovering it can be difficult.

More rails make interoperability the operating problem

Flood expects traditional and faster-payment rails to coexist with emerging digital asset rails and forms of money, including stablecoins, central bank digital currencies and tokenised deposits, for some time.

He sees interoperability as the mechanism that can allow those different rails and forms of money to coexist while giving users greater choice. A sender may care about cost, speed and friction, while a recipient may prefer a different form of money or settlement method. His longer-term view is that the infrastructure should be able to reconcile those preferences without requiring either party to manage the underlying complexity.

He also linked digital assets to smart contracts, describing how treasurers could use them with suppliers and recipients to build transaction chains that rely on different rails.

Flood pointed to Nexus as one example. Originally developed by the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, Nexus is designed to standardise how domestic instant-payment systems connect across countries, reducing the need for separate bilateral integrations. In 2025, the central banks of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand incorporated Nexus Global Payments to take the initiative towards live implementation. Indonesia, previously a special observer, joined as the sixth jurisdiction in February 2026.

Intelligent orchestration can abstract the choice of rail

Flood described this direction as “orchestrated intelligence”. A corporate treasurer moving liquidity between entities should not have to decide manually whether a payment should travel over an instant rail, a conventional cross-border route or eventually a digital asset network. The infrastructure should be able to determine the appropriate available route according to what the transaction requires.

For the client, Flood expects much of that decision-making eventually to disappear beneath the interface. He illustrated this with a treasurer moving $1 billion between entities: the treasurer should be able to focus on getting the funding where it is needed, while the system determines the most appropriate available route according to cost, speed and friction, subject to what the underlying rails can support.

Flood agreed that orchestrated intelligence could reduce funding requirements and costs, and added that it could increase observability and auditability. Even where the underlying choice becomes invisible to the treasurer, the transaction should still provide visibility into where the payment went, why a particular route was selected and an auditable record of that decision.

That changes where banks can create value. “The rail that it operates on should be just a rail,” Flood said. “It should just be a method to go from A to B.”

For clients, the value lies increasingly in receiving the outcome they need without having to manage the underlying route. Flood linked greater optionality to banks' ability to offer better products, expand their propositions and retain customers. At the same time, simplifying increasingly complicated payment applications and infrastructure can make them easier and cheaper to operate.

AI can also change how work is divided within payment operations. Flood sees lower value operational work, including parts of payment repair, becoming increasingly automated, allowing people to focus on more complicated exceptions. He does not expect banks to move immediately to fully autonomous repair. Human intervention remains important until institutions have enough confidence to allow a repaired payment to be released automatically.

Intelligent orchestration therefore does more than choose between rails. It can abstract increasingly complicated routing decisions from the client while giving banks another way to improve products, simplify operations and deploy human expertise where it adds greater value.

Control has to remain embedded in the intelligent payment

Flood's idea of the intelligent payment takes that abstraction a step further. He used the analogy of a driverless car to describe where payments could ultimately develop. An intelligent payment would know its destination and the constraints around getting there. It could choose a route, recognise that a cut-off time was approaching, avoid unnecessary repair queues and eventually correct certain problems automatically.

The analogy is useful because autonomy does not remove the requirement for rules. A driverless vehicle still has to understand the road around it; an intelligent payment still has to operate within the controls surrounding the transaction. As payments become more autonomous, Flood's argument is that control has to remain embedded throughout the payment lifecycle.

For Flood, preserving trust becomes more important as payments accelerate. Faster and tokenised payments can become harder to reverse once value has moved, increasing the consequences of a fraudulent instruction. “Trust is not built instantly; it's built systemically. But it's lost instantly,” he said.

Digital assets, AI and interoperability will converge

Looking towards Sibos 2027 in Singapore, Flood expects the discussion to move further towards the intersection of digital assets, AI and interoperability.

The proliferation of payment rails may ultimately make the rail itself less visible to the client, not more. If intelligent orchestration can select an appropriate route while preserving visibility, auditability and control, the client can focus on the outcome while the complexity of navigating the underlying payments infrastructure is increasingly abstracted away.

As more rails coexist, the differentiator may increasingly be not the rail itself, but how intelligently banks can orchestrate the choices underneath the payment.