Banking Interoperability: Blockchain as the Solution

Despite promises of instantaneity, international bank transfers remain trapped in a web of intermediaries and sequential validations—correspondent banks, clearinghouses, regional settlement systems. Each step adds delays, increases cost, and weakens traceability.

The global cross-border payments market surpassed $40 trillion in 2024 and continues to grow nearly 5% per year. Traditional banking routes no longer meet the demands of a digital-first global economy that needs real-time payments. Blockchain is emerging not as a novelty, but as a genuine infrastructure for interoperability and trust between institutions.

Efficiency Over Disruption
Blockchain's value in payments is not about “disintermediating” banks but about streamlining the flow of trust. By allowing multiple financial actors to share a distributed, secure ledger, blockchain eliminates redundant validation and reconciliation while ensuring transaction compliance.

Real-world use cases are multiplying: pre-funded stablecoin (USDC ) payments, secure interbank wallets, and tokenized account-to-account (A2A) transactions—especially in Asia and Europe. Major initiatives highlight the trend, like the new euro stablecoin launched by nine European banks (ING , UniCredit , KBC...), the Ripple —Thunes partnership for direct blockchain rails between institutions, and the BIS “Project Agora” exploring a programmable ledger shared by central and commercial banks. These efforts follow in the footsteps of Open Banking, aiming to further interoperability and reduce transaction costs.

With blockchain, a transfer between two banks in different countries no longer needs to pass through three infrastructures: it can be validated in seconds on a shared network built on consensus instead of duplication.

Consortiums Drive Maturity
A new wave of private bank consortiums is testing distributed architectures in hybrid environments, often at a European scale. Examples include the euro-backed stablecoin consortium and institutional networks like Canton Network, where private actors such as BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs connect securely via permissioned blockchain infrastructure. Here, innovation happens with regulators, not against them, aiming for a balance of performance, compliance, and sovereignty.

The real sign of maturity will be in scaling from technical prototypes to shared, trusted infrastructure—capable of adapting to upcoming European regulations like PSD3, MiCA, and DORA.

Cultural, Not Technical, Obstacles
The main barrier isn’t technological but cultural: a shared will to standardize protocols and create lasting interbank bridges is still missing. The Wero wallet, rolled out by the EPI initiative in France, Belgium, and Germany, enables instant bank-to-bank payments in under ten seconds, but adoption is slow—hindered by political, competitive, and cultural fragmentation in Europe’s banking market.

It’s the paradox of the “silent revolution”: the tech is ready, the promise is real, but collective coordination is needed for transformation.

Source: Forbes France
(https://www.forbes.fr/finance/interoperabilite-bancaire-la-reponse-est-dans-la-blockchain/)