Payments focused technology is the foundation on which reliable cross border payments platform must be built in order to achieve highly transparent, always available, secure, scalable solution that results in the best economics for a cross-border payment transaction. The complexity of building such a critical mission platform increases exponentially when one needs to adapt across a diverse ecosystem of existing rails.

According to McKinsey, in an increasingly multipolar world, payments systems are growing more complex, with a dizzying array of new national, transnational, and global payment rails emerging. These include entirely new payments rails (for example, stablecoins or central bank digital currencies such as the digital euro) or crossing of domestic instant payment rails (as in India, Malaysia, and Singapore, where payments can start on one system and end on another). This trend is likely to continue as national authorities push for increased sovereignty and payments operators look to boost resilience. In addition to increased localization, some governments are seeking to diversify their currency usage (for example, Chinese interest in paying for Saudi oil in renminbi), to reduce their dependency on external systems. As new strategies and payment schemes emerge, traditional protection mechanisms (for example, against fraud or AML) may not always be brought along for the ride. Systems and controls built for a single domestic payment rail are now confronted with a much broader array of threats.

RS Software’s core competency in payments is building Trust Per Second (TPS), and that too delivers via highly scalable, always available, and very secure platforms. The payments systems we continue to deliver since our early inception are transforming business models, ease of adoption is reshaping liquidity, market making, and risk management. Our innovative culture allows us to apply technology in more ways than one, accelerating the journey from paradigms to evolving value for humanity, while raising the bar for higher productivity. While building UPI and its cross-border overlay (iUPI) and the other rails of digital payments infrastructure for India, we recognized that the complexities of the cross-border payment transactions are highly impacted by currency volatility, regulatory changes, and the advent of technologies. A recent report says that “to enhance cross-border payment solutions, fintechs must navigate strategic considerations and challenges, including the impact of tariffs, sanctions, and supply chain adjustments on local foreign currency reserves.”

RS Software offers RS DigitalEdge™ (RSDE) product which essentially handles ISO 20022 message handling – payments and non-payments, sync-async conversion, routing, transformation, translation, orchestration, rule-engine, feed for billing, participant onboarding, reference data management, etc. RS has an ISO 20022 aware API Gateway which is a component that may be used in the mix as the approach the partners are taking is to contribute elements that exist and have been tested at-scale on production systems. Some of the key enhancements are handling of negotiated rate of foreign exchange from multiple FX providers, handling of Confirmation of Payee, unified UI/UX of the portals from administration, onboarding and other human interfacing, systems for exception handling, disputes, and inquiries, etc.

Speed

RSDE is built grounds up to orchestrate payment processing with complex flows. It uses an event-driven architecture along with in-memory processing and contextual message routing to ensure that transactions are processed in minimum possible time without compromising on data resiliency principles.

Transparency

RSDE maintains lineage for each transaction that it processes – meaning that each event (such as receiving or dispatch of a message, error, timeout, etc.) is recorded with the respective timestamp. This provides full transparency to the operations team on how a transaction was processed.

To the end user, every failure is explained in detail with error code and verbose error description. RSDE’s built-in error management module allows defining such situational error codes and mapping them with detailed descriptions, with HTML-like links embedded in them wherever necessary.

Also, if a transaction fails with multiple errors, RSDE tries to provide all of them wherever possible.

Predictability

From end-user perspective, every transaction must end in either a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

But ensuring this behaviour during times of system failure becomes tricky. RSDE has proactive recovery mechanisms that follows a system failure, which revives and gracefully closes transactions that were hung during the system failure.

Also, there are built-in circuit breakers that isolate an erring participant – pre-emptively declining any transaction headed that way.

Cost effectiveness

The solution is built on open-source technology, with clearly segregated micro services, devoid of tech debts. This keeps the implementation nimble, manageable, and cost-effective.

Modernising front-end channels using existing rails and infrastructure

To support such agility and flexibility, RSDE uses its built-in rule engine and DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)-engine that allows variations in processing based on contextual information.

Providing customers with more transparency on fees

This is achieved in RSDE through the use of the rule engine, with a low-code implementation, with potential use of some nested rules. 

In essence

Cross-border payments are at a critical inflection point. Despite rapid innovation, average consumer remittance fees remain high at 6.62% for a $200 transfer as of Q3 2024. While 90% of interbank payments now reach destination banks within an hour, only 43% of end-to-end cross-border transactions reach beneficiaries that quickly - largely due to persistent ‘last mile’ challenges. And the stakes are rising fast: global cross-border payment flows are projected to surge from $190 trillion in 2023 to $290 trillion by 2030³.

Once a back-office utility, cross-border payments have become a strategic battleground - where banks must lead, adapt, or risk disintermediation.

Regulatory fragmentation, shifting geopolitical alliances, real-time expectations, and emerging networks and digital currencies are converging to redefine cross-border clearing. By 2030, the banks that succeed won’t be those simply offering faster payments. They will be the ones embedding themselves as intelligent, compliant, value-adding infrastructure providers in the global financial ecosystem.