PAYMENTS
RTP, FedNow, SEPA Instant, UK Faster Payments — instant rail mechanics, liquidity, fraud, and pricing.
PAYMENTS & MONEY
Cross-border corporate treasury in 2026 is a multi-rail engineering problem. ISO 20022 is the common grammar, A2A and open finance under PSD3/FiDA are the customer-facing rail, tokenised deposits handle the wholesale settlement leg, and SWIFT still anchors the long tail. The interesting work is in the orchestration layer, not the model.
APPLIED AI
FedNow demands pre-funded 24/7 liquidity. ACH is cheap but T+1. USDC clears atomically but needs wallet infrastructure. The 2026 multi-rail bank routes each payment by cost, finality, and liquidity cost — driven by an orchestration engine that reads ISO 20022 pacs.008 and decides.
APPLIED AI
The Express Transaction Credits (EXTC) platform was an early-2018 experiment in programmable payments on Ethereum, using ERC-223 smart contracts to enable instant cross-border transfers and atomic payment flows — ideas that decentralised finance later scaled.
