Banks still move most of the world’s money. But increasingly, they do not control where the payment journey begins, where the customer relationship sits or where the commercial opportunities surrounding that flow are captured. That question shaped a transaction finance roundtable at The Asian Banker Summit 2026, bringing together senior banking and payments leaders from Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, MUFG, HSBC, BNY, OCBC, CIMB, Export-Import Bank of India, Global IME Bank of Nepal, Kenanga Digital, the Fintech Association of Hong Kong and other regional institutions and ecosystem participants to explore how the economics of payments are being reshaped by digital platforms, embedded finance models and changing client expectations. What emerged was not a single consensus view, but a sharper understanding of where competitive pressures are already visible, where banks remain structurally strong and where the industry may be underestimating the speed of change. At the centre of the debate was a growing separation between ownership of infrastructure and ownership of the customer relationship. Banks may still settle transactions, provide liquidity, manage risk and ensure regulatory compliance. But if the client interaction begins within a marketplace, super-app, wallet or digital ecosystem, much of the commercially valuable data, behavioural visibility and monetisation opportunity may already sit elsewhere. This is not unfolding evenly across the industry. Consumer payments have already moved furthest towards platform-led experiences. Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking is entering a more contested phase as expectations around speed, convenience and embedded access to finance rise. Corporate and institutional transaction banking remain more structurally defended, for now, by complexity, documentation requirements, liquidity needs, foreign exchange execution and the governance expectations attached to regulated flows. That unevenness explains why the industry is simultaneously confident and uneasy. Banks remain indispensable in important parts of the payments chain. But indispensability is no longer the same as ownership. When the payment starts elsewhere One of the clearest areas of agreement was that customer origination is becoming a more strategically important battleground. Emiko Tavernier, head of enterprise sales, Asia Pacific, at Mambu, described what she sees as a structural shift already visible across ASEAN, where payment initiation is moving upstream towards platforms that increasingly control the customer relationship. Super-apps, wallets and embedded ecosystem environments are steadily reducing the primacy of the traditional bank account as the first point of engagement. That view found support in the broader discussion, particularly from participants focused on retail and SME segments, where the competitive pressure is already tangible. The implications are significant. Ownership of the front end increasingly determines who sees the data first, who shapes the customer experience and who identifies adjacent monetisation opportunities. A bank may continue to process the payment, but if it no longer controls the customer interaction, its role risks becoming more infrastructural than commercial. This is why many institutions are now rethinking how payments, lending and customer engagement interact. The challenge is no longer simply processing transactions, but creating architectures that allow banks to act on payment intelligence in real time. Several bankers drew a clear distinction between segments. In consumer payments, disintermediation is already well advanced. Platforms and digital wallets increasingly shape user behaviour, often making the payment itself almost invisible. The customer relationship belongs to the interface, not necessarily to the institution moving the funds. The SME segment produced sharper concern. Smaller businesses increasingly expect the same immediacy and ease they experience elsewhere in digital commerce, yet many banks continue to serve them through fragmented processes and slower journeys. This is where competitive pressure from fintech challengers is becoming harder to dismiss. Institutional banking participants were more measured. Large-value treasury flows, liquidity concentration, regulated documentation and cross-border execution remain structurally different businesses. But even there, some cautioned against assuming that infrastructure ownership alone guarantees future commercial relevance. Trust still matters, but it is not enough If there was one consistent counterweight to disintermediation concerns, it was trust. A recurring view in the discussion was that payment infrastructure is not merely about moving value between endpoints. It involves settlement finality, fraud control, sanctions screening, regulatory compliance, anti-money laundering oversight and operational accountability. These obligations create cost, but they also create real barriers to entry. That argument carried particular weight in cross-border payments, where operational complexity remains substantial. Payment purpose declarations, documentation requirements, jurisdictional controls and regulatory oversight continue to favour regulated institutions with established operational depth. Some participants argued strongly that trust becomes most visible precisely when systems fail or regulatory complexity intensifies. A smoother interface is attractive in ordinary conditions. But institutional accountability becomes far more valuable when something goes wrong. That remains a genuine commercial advantage. Yet there was little appetite for complacency. A bank with slower onboarding, clunky interfaces or poorly integrated payment experiences cannot rely indefinitely on trust as a substitute for competitiveness. Dependence on regulated infrastructure does not automatically preserve ownership of the economic value surrounding the transaction. The stronger interpretation was that trust remains strategically valuable, but only when paired with operational competitiveness. The economics are moving beyond the payment itself The most important commercial shift may be that payments are becoming harder to monetise as standalone products. Won Kim, head of solutions engineering, Asia Pacific, at Mambu, framed this sharply, arguing that traditional payments economics historically benefited from three structural advantages: limited pricing transparency, a lack of meaningful alternatives and the ability to monetise settlement delay. Real-time payment rails, digital competition and pricing visibility are steadily weakening all three. That diagnosis reflected wider concerns in the room. Bankers acknowledged growing pressure on direct payments economics, particularly in account-to-account and instant payment environments where the movement of money itself is becoming increasingly commoditised. But few viewed this as evidence that payments are becoming less strategically important. Rather, the economic value is shifting beyond the transaction itself. Several strands of discussion converged around this point. Payment flows increasingly generate commercially useful intelligence: liquidity patterns, behavioural signals, treasury opportunities, transaction intent and financing triggers. The institutions best positioned to capture this value are increasingly those that can connect payment events directly to lending, treasury and customer servicing workflows, rather than treating payments as a standalone product. The SME segment illustrated this most clearly. A payment event may reveal a predictable working capital need long before a customer formally requests financing. In principle, that should create an opportunity for the institution already handling the transaction. But in practice, that opportunity is often lost. The execution gap is where value is leaking One of the strongest points of agreement in the room was that many banks are not losing because they misunderstand the strategic opportunity. They are losing because they cannot act fast enough. Kim’s argument on execution latency was particularly pointed. Many institutions already possess the relevant client relationship, the data and the commercial opportunity. Yet payments systems, lending engines and approval structures remain fragmented across different teams and operating models. An integrated competitor can respond in hours. A traditional institution may still require days or weeks. Several participants noted that the issue is often less about access to data than the ability to operationalise it quickly across products and business lines. Fragmented architectures can make it difficult to convert payment intelligence into timely commercial action. That observation struck a chord well beyond Mambu’s perspective. Several participants pointed out that fintech challengers have often won less through structural pricing superiority than through the systematic removal of friction. Faster onboarding, simpler journeys, cleaner interfaces and integrated workflows create meaningful competitive advantage even when the underlying economics are not radically different. This concern was strongest in SMEs, where delays that might once have been tolerated increasingly feel commercially unacceptable. At the same time, the discussion resisted simplistic narratives of inevitable decline. Some bankers pointed to examples where incumbents have regained competitiveness in retail payment corridors by materially improving digital experiences, pricing transparency and domestic payment integration. That matters because it suggests competitive displacement is not irreversible. But the distinction is important. Recovery requires decisive execution, not passive reliance on incumbency. Technology is only part of the problem Legacy systems surfaced repeatedly, but the discussion treated them less as the root problem than as a symptom of broader organisational design issues. Tavernier argued that fragmentation across payments, lending and client interaction remains a practical constraint in many banks. Incremental upgrades may improve isolated components while leaving the overall commercial journey frustratingly slow. Several participants observed that banks are increasingly looking for more flexible operating models that allow products, payments and customer journeys to evolve together, rather than through separate transformation programmes. Kim’s critique went further. Too many institutions, he argued, still approach transformation as a technology programme rather than a business redesign exercise. That distinction resonated with several participants. A bank can migrate to newer infrastructure and still preserve slow approvals, fragmented ownership and disconnected operational models. Old inefficiencies simply reappear in a more modern technical wrapper. The discussion also surfaced a familiar frustration around innovation. Proofs of concept often succeed technically, only to fail commercially when responsibility shifts between teams with different mandates, risk tolerances and definitions of success. The broader conclusion was difficult to avoid: architecture matters, but organisational design increasingly determines commercial speed. Institutional payments may be later, not different One of the more interesting tensions in the discussion concerned whether institutional transaction banking is genuinely insulated, or simply experiencing a slower version of the same forces reshaping consumer payments. For now, large-value commercial and treasury flows remain more structurally defended. Complexity, regulatory obligations, foreign exchange execution, liquidity management and settlement risk continue to reward scale, trust and operational depth. That remains commercially meaningful. But several participants questioned how durable that separation will be. Client expectations rarely remain neatly segmented. Faster onboarding, better interfaces, greater transparency and integrated workflows are unlikely to remain consumer-only expectations indefinitely. That does not mean institutional transaction banking is about to be disrupted in the same way as consumer payments. But it does suggest that complexity should not be mistaken for permanent immunity. The stronger institutional franchises are likely to be those that use today’s structural advantages as a platform for reinvention, rather than as justification for inertia. Participation is no longer the same as ownership Banks are not being removed from payments. Trusted infrastructure still matters. Liquidity still matters. Cross-border execution remains operationally demanding. Regulatory accountability continues to carry real economic value. But participation alone is no longer enough. Customer origination is shifting. Data visibility is becoming commercially decisive. Monetisation is moving into adjacent products and services. Speed is becoming a competitive differentiator. Organisational fragmentation is creating avoidable strategic weakness. The strategic risk for banks is not exclusion from payments. It is continued participation with declining economic relevance. The institutions most likely to emerge stronger will not necessarily be those trying to preserve end-to-end ownership of every layer of the payments chain. They will be those making deliberate choices about where defensible value remains, and reorganising themselves to capture it. That may mean becoming the infrastructure partner digital platforms depend on. It may mean embedding financing and treasury propositions into customer workflows. It may mean turning payment intelligence into faster commercial decisions. Banks will continue to move the money. The more important question is who captures the value created around it.
