For years, the goal in global payments was simple: connect businesses to more rails. The pitch was always speed, lower cost, broader reach. The problem was access.
Now access is no longer the problem. The problem is what to do with all of it.
Businesses operating cross border can now choose among local payment rails, real-time payment networks, correspondent banking, stablecoins and a growing collection of digital settlement mechanisms. Each promises improvements in speed, cost or reach. Each also introduces its own compliance burden.
As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster observed during a recent conversation with OpenPayd CEO Iana Dimitrova, companies find themselves “stitching together banks, FX providers, payment rails, now crypto on and off ramps,” with each carrying its own integration and compliance burden. The result is an infrastructure puzzle that businesses were never meant to solve on their own.
That is the opening OpenPayd is building toward. The London-based financial infrastructure firm offers a single integration connecting payment accounts, foreign exchange, local and cross-border payments, treasury services and digital asset capabilities. Its argument is that the complexity of modern payment infrastructure has become a business problem, not just a technical one, and that orchestration is the answer.
“It’s not the job of businesses to think about the infrastructure payment and to think about regulation,” she told Webster. “They have to focus on what they do best, which is developing and selling their products and services.”
Historically, Dimitrova said that orchestration meant routing payments through different providers to improve authorization rates or cut costs. The definition is expanding. Today, she said, it describes the mechanism through which businesses access an array of payment types without managing each one separately.
“We choose, dynamically and in real time, the most appropriate channel for that money movement,” Dimitrova said to Webster.
The criteria shift with each transaction.
“It could be speed. It could be the cost. It could be the acceptance rate,” she elaborated.
In practice, that means a single payment may travel through a local clearing system in one market, traditional banking rails in another and stablecoin infrastructure in a third.
Tokenized Deposits, Stablecoins and the Liquidity Question
Major banks are evaluating tokenized deposits. Stablecoins are finding footholds in cross-border commerce. Payments firms continue investing in infrastructure that bridges traditional banking systems and blockchain-based networks. Each development reignites the same question: Will one model displace the others?
Dimitrova does not think so. She argued the future depends heavily on interoperability.
“We are all, in a way, competing with each other for a share of the global money movement, but we are equally complementary to each other,” she said.
That framing helps explain why many infrastructure providers now describe themselves as rail-agnostic. Businesses care about timing, certainty and access to funds. The technology underlying any given transaction is often secondary.
The conversation also looked ahead to what Dimitrova described as the next frontier: autonomous commerce.
“We will be seeing fully programmable, fully autonomous payment instructions,” Dimitrova predicted. As Webster said, “Trust builds over time because you see money moving a certain way between certain buyers and sellers.”
The willingness of businesses to delegate routing decisions today may be laying the groundwork for fully automated commerce tomorrow.
The discussion comes as OpenPayd pursues a Nasdaq listing through a SPAC transaction. Dimitrova described the move as part of the company’s next stage of growth, providing broader access to capital markets as the business expands.
Watch the full interview with Iana Dimitrova to learn more about:
- Why Dimitrova believes regulatory licenses remain one of the industry’s most durable competitive advantages.
- How OpenPayd evaluates when a stablecoin route is preferable to traditional banking infrastructure.
- What the mix of fiat, stablecoins and tokenized deposits could look like five years from now.
