Instant domestic payment systems already work and several countries have linked theirs bilaterally, cutting cross-border transfers from days to seconds at a fraction of the cost. But each new bilateral link involves its own negotiation, and multilateral alternatives have yet to go fully live.

Meanwhile, the G20's own 2027 targets for cost and transparency in cross-border payments are, on current trajectory, likely to be missed. The persistent blocker often isn't the payment rail at all, but mismatched technical requirements between jurisdictions that add friction regardless of which technology carries the transaction. What would it actually take to move from a growing patchwork of bilateral links to something that scales – or will the growing adoption of tokenized instruments for cross-border payments render these efforts obsolete?

This session explores the multiple pathways to achieving greater cross-border payments connectivity, from shared multilateral hubs, scaling up bilateral linkages, tokenized instruments, and alternative approaches developed by FinTechs to scaling instant cross-border payments connectivity. Participants will discuss the technical and commercial barriers to scaling instant payments connectivity; identify why current models have yet to deliver the G20 targets; discuss whether the KPIs themselves need redesigning to better capture end-user outcomes; explore the role of tokenized instruments as an alternative approach to solving the cross-border challenge; and determine the viable approaches to greater payments connectivity.

Insights from this discussion will help inform the Financial Stability Board (FSB) as it considers priorities for enhancing cross-border payments beyond 2027.

Most conversations about improving instant payment systems focus on iteration: faster rails, lower costs, broader interoperability. This roundtable asks a more foundational question: are there aspects of how these systems are typically architected that are worth revisiting at the root, rather than only refining at the edges?

Many systems today rely on a model where a payment is sent, and if something doesn’t match up, the two sides exchange after-the-fact messages to reconcile what happened. This reconciliation-heavy approach carries real ongoing cost, and emerging approaches, including early pilot evidence, suggest that dependence on it can be reduced through pre-validation, where payment data is checked and verified before a transaction is executed. Such design choices made early in a scheme’s architecture can shape how easily it extends to full inclusion later.

This session aims to bring together development institutions, instant payments players, central banks, and relevant voices to discuss whether the iterative path – where systems are made incrementally better over time – or the fundamental path – where systems are rebuilt from the ground up – is a more viable solution for national payments systems looking to embark on pre-validation.

The roundtable aims to produce a practical roadmap for countries looking to implement prevalidation across financial institutions. Where available, early pilot data will serve as evidence, discussed frankly under the Chatham House Rule.

The GDF Global Stablecoin Regulatory Playbook, published in January 2026, set out shared terminology and outcome-based principles for stablecoin regulation across jurisdictions. The subsequent report ‘Global Stablecoin Regulatory Frameworks: Closing the Gap’ drawn from insights at the Point Zero Forum in June 2026 took this work a step further. It mapped where regulators already agree and isolated the one problem that domestic frameworks were never designed to solve: how a stablecoin issued under one jurisdiction's rules can circulate safely under another's.

The report framed two models for scaling beyond domestic rules. The first keeps issuance local while seeking to preserve a unified token, through multiple licensed entities issuing a fungible stablecoin under comparable standards. The second permits a foreign-issued stablecoin to operate through recognition based on comparable, rather than identical, regulatory outcomes. It also recorded differing regulatory perspectives on the perceived risk associated with multi-issuance, particularly correlated redemption pressure and the resilience of a stablecoin’s fungibility under stress.

The roundtable convenes policymakers, global standard-setters and industry leaders to examine how these models could operate in practice. When is multi-issuance necessary to meet host-jurisdiction objectives? When can unilateral or mutual recognition provide sufficient safeguards? Where a combination of the two is appropriate, how should responsibility for reserves, redemption, supervision and crisis management be allocated? The session will focus on the conditions needed to make each approach workable while preserving fungibility and avoiding unnecessary regulatory fragmentation.