Most people don’t think about how money moves across borders. You tap your card on vacation or wire a supplier overseas and assume it works the same everywhere; fast and invisible. Beneath the surface, though, global payments remain slow, costly, and overly dependent on a single hub: New York.
The reason is correspondent banking, the plumbing of international finance built for a different era. Instead of funds moving directly from one country to another, a bank relies on an intermediary, often a U.S. bank in New York, to provide services on its behalf. That made sense when technology was limited and trust was scarcer. Today, it has become a bottleneck.
