Julie Guetta

Cross-border payments are the backbone of global trade and financial flows, yet they continue to face significant frictions, including inefficiencies, high costs, and complex regulatory landscapes. Central banks and financial institutions have been exploring various approaches to deliver public goods —bilateral, regional, and multilateral initiatives— to improve speed, cost, accessibility, transparency and resilience. By sharing lessons learned, key challenges, and past strategies, Part A of this roundtable will be an opportunity for discussants to take stock of key developments in cross border payments and importantly provide an opportunity to draw out key lessons and insights from the past and present evolution of cross border payments. 
 
Building on these insights, Part B will focus on the opportunities for transformation to explore what is next. The discussion will explore how private sector innovation and public-private collaboration can enhance cross-border payment systems, with a particular emphasis on the opportunities that the newly minted Nexus global hub brings as it comes into live operations. Key areas of exploration include emerging use cases, commercial models, industry partnerships, and technological advancements. A core consideration will be the long-term sustainability of these solutions—ensuring that improvements are scalable, inclusive, and resilient in an increasingly interconnected financial ecosystem. 

This roundtable is designed to generate tangible insights that contribute to the evolution of cross-border payments. A detailed roundtable report will be prepared, capturing key discussion points, lessons learned, and emerging recommendations. This document will serve as a resource for participants and industry stakeholders, supporting future iterations and potential scaling of innovative solutions in this space. 

European policymakers are actively seeking to reduce reliance on overseas technology giants while fostering homegrown tech innovation, with initiatives such as the EU Chips Act, the EU AI Act, Gaia-X and the EuroStack. Does Europe’s push for digital independence enable a more competitive technology ecosystem or does it risk creating new regulatory and technological barriers that stifle cross-border technology collaboration? What are these trade-offs, and what are the opportunities for digital decoupling to enable other policy goals, such as nurturing local innovation ecosystems and build sovereign, trustworthy payment systems? This roundtable will explore the trade-offs and opportunities offered by the digital sovereignty movement, and spotlight the case of digital payments as an example where these questions are playing out.

This roundtable gathers researchers, technologists, policymakers, as well as AI and digital payments experts, to identify the steps Europe can take to invest in the capabilities, skills, and partnerships needed to drive digital sovereignty efforts; explore how European privacy standards are influencing the development of sovereign digital payments infrastructure in Europe; learn from alternative models emerging from the Global South; and map out a European path towards technological autonomy.

This roundtable seeks to:

• Identify the steps Europe can take to mobilise and invest in the capabilities, skills, and partnerships needed to drive digital sovereignty efforts
• Explore the trade-offs of Europe’s digital decoupling strategy and its impact on technology research, enterprise adoption, and cross-border innovation, and identify opportunities for digital decoupling to achieve these policy goals
• Learn from open-source alternatives emerging from Europe and the Global South that offer pathways of technological autonomy
• Map out a third way to achieving a European Innovation paradigm built on European privacy standards as an alternative model to the Big-Tech-driven US approach and China’s state-led ecosystem