Regulations should enable cross-border payments, not complicate them.
Dima Kats, Clear Junction’s CEO and Founder.
This blog is based on insights Dima shared during the Pay360 panel in March 2025, titled “Across the Divide: Can Cross-Border Payments Be Easy, Cheap, and Reliable?”. The discussion explored what’s needed from regulators to make cross-border payments more accessible, the role of data sharing in fraud prevention, and how better regulation could unlock financial inclusion.
Money moves faster than ever, yet many of the rules governing it are stuck in the past. If financial borders don’t really exist in a digital-first economy, why are businesses still contending with outdated, fragmented regulations just to move funds from A to B?
The challenges of domestic payments (acceptance, platform resilience, costs) have largely been solved, but cross-border payments come with a whole host of new challenges to grapple with. Those challenges include slow settlement, high costs of intermediaries, and compliance logjams that can slow transaction speed to a crawl.
Then there is the sheer amount of fragmentation and lack of interoperability affecting cross-border payments too. We have some way to go before cross-border payments become as cheap, reliable and as seamless as consumer payments. But just as those challenges were overcome in consumer payments, they can be solved for cross-border payments too.
The problem isn’t technology – it’s a regulatory mindset that hasn’t fully adapted. While recent efforts have aimed to bring more clarity, too often, businesses are still faced with uncertainty. And until that changes, cross-border payments will remain slower, more expensive, and more complicated than they need to be.
Throughout my career, I’ve observed how outdated regulations unnecessarily restrain the potential for innovation, failing to align with the advancements and practical realities of today’s technology. We’re at a point where regulatory changes need to match the pace of technological advances to support global economic opportunities.
Removing obstacles to innovation
The challenge isn’t whether we regulate – it’s how we regulate. The payments and crypto sectors have seen huge growth, yet many businesses struggle to keep up with shifting compliance requirements.
Clear Junction’s research found that 37% of payment leaders cite regulatory clarity as their biggest challenge, while 24% find the authorisation process difficult to navigate.
This was evident with the rollout of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which promised a unified framework but left many businesses uncertain about what compliance meant in practice.
By the time MiCA was fully enforced in December 2024, payments and crypto firms had been racing to understand whether they needed authorisation, how stablecoin rules would impact their business and whether their existing compliance strategies would hold up.
While MiCA represents a major step toward regulatory clarity, it also exposes a recurring problem: businesses are too often left scrambling to interpret new rules at the last minute. Instead of treating regulation as a box-ticking exercise, we need a regulatory culture that prioritises practical implementation alongside policy development. Clarity must come before enforcement, not after.
Data sharing that works for everyone
Beyond compliance, one of the biggest regulatory gaps in cross-border payments is the lack of coordinated data sharing. Fraud prevention depends on information flowing between institutions, yet inconsistent data policies often slow this process down.
The solution isn’t just more data, it’s smarter data sharing. Regulations need to support real-time, cross-border fraud intelligence without introducing unnecessary friction. That means global cooperation to ensure that businesses can access and share the right data while still upholding privacy and security standards.
Fintech has already proven that it can expand access to financial services, whether through mobile banking, stablecoins or real-time payments. But in many cases, regulatory complexity has slowed progress, preventing innovation from reaching the people who need it most.
For instance, stablecoins have the potential to reduce remittance costs and make global payments more accessible. Using stablecoins pegged to a unit of monetary value like the dollar can help companies avoid the expensive FX fee fluctuations that affect more exotic currencies (like the SAR) outside of the major currency pairs like USD/GBP or EUR/USD.
Yet under MiCA, non-EU stablecoins now face strict transaction limits. While these rules aim to protect the euro’s dominance, they also risk limiting viable alternatives for people and businesses seeking efficient cross-border payments.
Regulators should be asking: Are we enabling financial inclusion, or are we putting up more barriers? A more flexible, risk-based approach would enable fintechs to bring essential services to the unbanked and underbanked while still ensuring compliance and security.
A case for regulatory harmonisation
The hotchpotch of regulations across different markets remains one of the biggest challenges in global payments. Businesses moving money across borders don’t just deal with one compliance standard, they deal with many, each with its own interpretations and requirements.
MiCA was designed to streamline crypto regulation across the EU, replacing 27 different rulebooks with a single framework. But this level of standardisation shouldn’t be limited to crypto. Why stop at digital assets when payments and financial services would benefit from the same approach?