The Path of Max Resistance: The Spectrum of Global Payments Infrastructure

My Note to Employees:

The global payments industry can be inscrutable to the average observer. Hundreds of companies describe themselves in nearly identical terms: fast, global, built for modern businesses. And the UX is often indistinguishable across platforms. Under the hood, however, companies are solving the puzzle of how to enable global payment flows in meaningfully different ways, and it's worth paying attention to these differences.

You can chart three distinct paths among the current cohort of major players: some companies have leveraged technology to bypass legacy rails entirely, some have abstracted legacy rails, and some are attempting the difficult task of rebuilding the infrastructure itself.

Path of least resistance: Circumventing legacy rails (Stablecoins)

Stablecoins are the newest and most exciting innovation in our space. As programmable digital assets pegged to fiat currency and settled on public blockchains, they offer a genuinely novel way to move value across borders with near-instant settlement, lower fees, and access to corridors that traditional rails serve poorly. For retail and consumer use cases especially, the improvement is meaningful.

That said, stablecoins in their current form are likely not ready (yet) for enterprise B2B payments at scale. Regulatory frameworks remain fragmented across jurisdictions, on- and off-ramps introduce meaningful friction and cost, and the compliance questions around accountability, licensing, and AML are still being worked out globally. These are solvable problems, and we expect the landscape to mature but for now, enterprise adoption requires navigating a level of complexity that most businesses aren't positioned to absorb.

The path of moderate resistance: Abstracting legacy infrastructure (Partner fintechs)

In the middle of this spectrum sits the majority of the market: fintechs that have made rational, short-term decisions to move faster and expand coverage by working with partners and intermediaries to abstract the complexity of legacy infrastructure rather than replace it.

This approach has clear, immediate utility. These players mask the mess of correspondent banking: simplifying onboarding, clarifying pricing, and reducing settlement times. That is a real improvement for customers. But the underlying infrastructure — the correspondent chains, the bilateral relationships, the compliance dependencies — remain.

Building better UI is a software problem; replacing the global rails of value exchange is an infrastructure project of a much higher order. Very few players have the ambition to pursue that kind of project because it is difficult, time-consuming, and resource intensive. In 2026, a nicer interface is a commodity product. It doesn't materially change the way global payments actually work.

The Path of Max Resistance: Rebuilding global infrastructure (Airwallex)

At Airwallex, we took a fundamentally different approach to everyone else in the market, and it took a long time.

First, we hold licenses directly in the jurisdictions where we operate, which requires us to have boots on the ground. We engage dozens of regulators across dozens of markets at any given time, from G10 economies like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Japan, to strategic gateways like Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico and UAE, and state-specific regulators in the US Money Transmitter License (MTL) framework. We maintain these relationships as a directly licensed entity in as many markets as possible, with ongoing supervisory dialogue, not through intermediary relationships. This is a fundamental distinction. Operating through a network of partners might accelerate go-to-market in a new country, but it fragments compliance requirements, tools, and accountability across a chain of intermediaries. By holding the licenses ourselves, the buck stops with us.

This choice invites scrutiny. Regulators engage with us more directly because we have taken on that responsibility. That means more examinations, more reporting obligations, and more visibility into our operations than your average fintech faces. On any given day, we are managing active dialogues with dozens of global oversight bodies and directly addressing the hyper-specific reporting mandates of every jurisdiction where we hold a license. The depth of that engagement, we believe, makes us a more resilient company.

So why do we do this? Cross-border payments still often rely on the correspondent banking system or regional aggregators, a process whereby funds travel through a network of banks or local payment providers, adding time and fees along the way.Companies that are dependent on that chain are exposed to it. Changes in partner relationships, shifts in a correspondent bank's risk appetite, or a market requiring direct engagement can all create fragility that is invisible until it is not. Owning the infrastructure means that over time, we can reduce that category of risk. That’s our ambition.

We think the companies that will form the backbone of global financial infrastructure ten and twenty years from now are likely to be those that built direct relationships with regulators, that own their compliance frameworks end to end, and that have accepted the cost of doing that properly rather than routing around it. That has always been expensive, painstaking and slow to build. AI only makes this path more urgent and necessary; we think it’s the right investment.

The Future of the Stack

At the end of the day, our customers care about the product. Because we own the stack, we are solving a fragmentation tax that global businesses have paid for decades. Unlike providers that focus on domestic spend or a single part of the payment stack, Airwallex unifies the entire lifecycle of money. Customers increasingly use us across multiple products, which tells us something important: delivering money-saving business results with one powerful platform compounds the same way infrastructure does.

Airwallex’s approach – building the foundation ourselves through local licenses, local presence, and regulatory relationships – unlocks an opportunity to build and innovate on top of it across the full spectrum of financial products of today and the future. Stablecoins, new payment rails, and emerging settlement mechanisms become opportunities we can evaluate and integrate for customers, rather than existential threats.

And as commerce becomes increasingly agentic, with software acting autonomously to move money, execute transactions, and manage liquidity on behalf of businesses, the underlying infrastructure those agents run on will matter enormously.

The stablecoin world and the licensed infrastructure world are not necessarily in opposition either. The more stablecoins mature and face their own regulatory requirements, the more the underlying question becomes the same one we have been answering: who is accountable, in which jurisdiction, and under what framework? The technology differs. The compliance problem converges.

We are a decade into building this way. The infrastructure is durable because it is both compliant and flexible, built to move with regulatory requirements and technological opportunities as they evolve, not against them. Direct relationships with regulators mean we stay ahead of inevitable shifts; flexible technology means we can respond when they arrive. The cost has been high and the timeline long. But in a world of shortcuts, we think that is precisely the point.