Most people don’t think about how money moves across borders. You tap your card on vacation or wire a supplier overseas and assume it works the same everywhere; fast and invisible. Beneath the surface, though, global payments remain slow, costly, and overly dependent on a single hub: New York.
The reason is correspondent banking, the plumbing of international finance built for a different era. Instead of funds moving directly from one country to another, a bank relies on an intermediary, often a U.S. bank in New York, to provide services on its behalf. That made sense when technology was limited and trust was scarcer. Today, it has become a bottleneck.
Consider a business in Nairobi paying a supplier in Berlin. The transaction typically detours through a U.S. correspondent bank before reaching Germany. That extra leg adds time, fees, and operational risk—even when neither party has any commercial tie to the United States. If the same flight path were imposed on travel—Kenya to New York to Germany—we’d call it inefficient design. Yet we accept similar friction for the world’s financial arteries. In most markets, I can send money to a friend instantly or summon an Uber to my door in minutes. Global payments should run at the speed of modern software.
As for New York, the city is the center of global finance for good reasons: the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, deep U.S. capital markets, and the reliability of U.S. rule of law. Those are strategic assets. Many rightly value the advantages they confer—from lower funding costs to unrivaled financial depth. The objective, then, is not to “route around” New York or diminish U.S. influence. It is to upgrade the rails so that dollar settlement is more accessible, more resilient, and more competitive for the next generation of commerce.
Concentration has consequences. When payments depend on a handful of correspondent relationships, shocks in one jurisdiction can ripple worldwide—whether from sanctions, de-risking decisions, cybersecurity incidents, or compliance backlogs. Small and midsize companies, especially in emerging markets, bear the brunt: fees that can climb into the high single digits or more, settlements that take days rather than seconds, and liquidity trapped by time-zone and banking-hours constraints. For them, an inefficient payments network is not just an inconvenience; it is a growth ceiling.
What would a modern system look like? It would minimize intermediaries, settle in real time, and rely on open, interoperable infrastructure that reduces single points of failure while preserving compliance and auditability. This is not about reinventing money; it is about improving the routes money takes.
So how do we go about this? The best path is a system designed around properly regulated, fully reserved dollar stablecoins. Stablecoins can move dollars across borders in near real time at low cost, with transparent records that simplify compliance and reconciliation. For a manufacturer in Lagos paying a supplier in Istanbul, that can mean seconds instead of days and basis points instead of percentage points.
Embracing this modernization would not undermine U.S. financial leadership. It would reinforce it. If dollars move faster, cheaper, and with better compliance tooling than alternatives, international businesses will deepen—not reduce—their dollar usage. Allowing low-margin transmission to occur on efficient rails frees New York to focus on what it does best: price discovery, underwriting, risk management, asset management, and capital formation. Real-time, auditable settlement reduces operational and counterparty risk and can even enhance sanctions efficacy by making flows more traceable. Open rails paired with rigorous U.S. oversight keep American norms: rule of law, investor protection, and prudential supervision, at the center of global finance.
Consider the alternative. If the status quo persists, it further opens the door for closed, proprietary networks and non-dollar systems to gain share where the correspondent model is most fragile. If American policymakers instead embrace interoperable dollar rails, they future-proof the dollar’s role and widen the moat around New York’s financial ecosystem.
Stablecoins are not the only route to modernizing the correspondent banking system. Central banks are exploring digital currencies, and banks and fintechs are building faster cross-border corridors. The common thread is upgrading settlement to be real-time, programmable, and interoperable. Among these, fully reserved, well-regulated dollar stablecoins are notable because they are market-ready today and compatible with existing compliance frameworks.
We have lived with detours for half a century. It is time to give global trade infrastructure that matches the pace of modern business—direct where it can be, fast when it must be, and open enough to be resilient. Do that, and the outcome is not less New York. It is a stronger dollar, a more competitive U.S. financial system, and a global economy that moves at the speed of the world we actually live in.
Chris Maurice is the CEO of Yellow Card, the largest licensed stablecoin payments company in Africa and emerging markets.
