By Akash Arun, Founder & CEO, Glomo
India has changed what people expect from payments. A domestic transaction today can be completed in seconds. You scan, authenticate and move on. The process is fast, visible and largely predictable.
The experience can be very different when money crosses a border.
An international payment may still involve multiple institutions, documentation, foreign exchange conversion, intermediary charges and reconciliation. The sender may not always know exactly when the beneficiary will receive the money, what the final amount will be after charges, or where the transaction is if it gets delayed.
This is the gap the payments industry now needs to address.
India has shown that payment infrastructure can work at massive scale without making the user-experience complicated. But cross-border payments are a harder problem because they operate across different regulatory, legal and monetary systems.
A transaction moving between two countries may involve different compliance requirements, currencies, settlement systems and operating hours. Even if both countries have real-time domestic payment networks, the payment between them may still not be real time.
The real challenge, therefore, is not just speed. It is interoperability.
Countries are already moving in this direction by linking fast-payment systems, extending operating hours and adopting more common messaging standards. Asia-Pacific has been particularly active, with the UPI-PayNow linkage between India and Singapore being one example.
Yet connecting payment rails is only part of the solution.
The Financial Stability Board has noted that while progress has been made at the policy and infrastructure level, improvements for end users remain modest. Cost, speed and transparency continue to vary across markets. That is because an international payment involves much more than moving funds. Identity checks, compliance, foreign exchange, settlement and reconciliation all form part of the transaction. If any one of these remains fragmented or manual, the overall experience remains slow.
There is also a broader industry shift towards reducing the number of intermediaries involved in an international transaction. Recent developments in the payments infrastructure space illustrate this trend. For example, recent Visa Principal Membership in India allows it to connect directly to Visa’s network rather than routing card payments through a sponsor bank. While this is one company-specific development, it reflects a broader industry question: how much of the complexity embedded in cross-border payments can be removed by reducing unnecessary handoffs between participants?
India’s domestic payments journey illustrates the value of interoperability in practice. UPI’s success is not only about instant payments. Its larger achievement is that users do not need to think about which bank or app sits at the other end of a transaction. Cross-border payments need the same principle. The goal does not have to be one global payment system. What matters is whether different systems can communicate better, exchange information more efficiently and reduce unnecessary handoffs. Transparency will matter just as much. A business should know what a payment will cost, what exchange rate is being applied and when the money is likely to arrive. This becomes increasingly important as Indian businesses expand globally. Software companies, exporters, professionals and manufacturers are all operating across markets more easily than before.
Payment infrastructure needs to keep pace.
Every delay affects working capital. Every unexplained charge affects margins. Every reconciliation issue creates more operational work.
Cross-border payments should therefore be seen as part of trade infrastructure, not just as a banking issue. India has already changed what people expect from payments at home. The next challenge is to bring that same sense of simplicity, visibility and certainty to money moving across borders.