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Is global money movement fragmenting into a mess of competing rails, or converging toward something faster and cheaper? Visa's Tim Moncrieff, SWIFT's Shriyanka Hore, Banking Circle's Mikkel Grønlykke, and GCash's Arjun Varma debated that question with moderator Anthony Thomas (GFTN), landing on an uncomfortable truth: it's often easier to move $100 million across the world than to move $100.
Payments is heading toward convergence, not permanent fragmentation
Tim Moncrieff argued that two decades of innovation on the front end of payments (wallets, tap-to-pay, in-app experiences) drove up expectations that have started bleeding into institutional and corporate treasury demands, while the back end has only just begun to diverge at scale — proven out by stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement running alongside legacy rails for the first time. His prediction: once institutional adoption of these new formats scaled, convergence between traditional finance and stablecoin infrastructure would follow naturally.
Why is moving $100 harder than moving $100 million?
Arjun Varma said GCash's real challenge isn't infrastructure at the top of the value chain, it's the last mile. GCash already operates across 160 countries without local entities, but its customers are the underserved and unbanked, sending remittances as small as $100, where banking fees, FX spreads, and transaction charges eat into a meaningful share of what roughly 10 million overseas Filipino workers send home. GCash's answer isn't to make traditional remittance cheaper, but to let those workers pay bills back in the Philippines directly through the app, cutting the send-to-a-trusted-recipient model out entirely.
Settlement and FX are where cross-border payments can actually improve
Tim Moncrieff broke cross-border friction into three sources. Regulation and compliance (KYC/AML) is "good friction" worth keeping, since it protects the system even if it could be streamlined. Monetary frameworks, the fact that money, and increasingly stablecoins, are sovereign, regulated constructs, create necessary friction by design. The real opportunity, he said, is settlement and FX: batch processing, fixed operating hours, and legacy cutoff times, which stablecoins and crypto have already shown can work differently by replacing correspondent banks with market makers and exchanges. Shriyanka Hore pushed the point further, arguing SWIFT, often mistaken for being just "legacy correspondent banking" when in fact more than half its traffic is securities flows rather than payments, is building toward that same future, including a new blockchain-based shared ledger designed to tackle wholesale FX risk and support 24/7, programmable settlement.
Speakers:
Arjun Varma, General Manager, GCash International
Mikkel Grønlykke, President, Banking Circle
Shriyanka Hore, Managing Director, Swift
Tim Moncrieff, Managing Director of Visa Payments & Currencycloud & VP, Strategic Initiatives & Execution, Visa Direct, Visa
Host:
Anthony Thomas, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer of the Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN)
Point Zero Forum 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland
