"The payment rail is now a strategic choice, not a given."
Few people understand the infrastructure behind real-time and cross-border payments better than John C. Rodriguez. John brings decades of experience in international payments and currently serves as Senior Consultant at TerraPay, a global payments infrastructure company connecting banks, digital wallets and real-time payment networks across more than 152 corridors worldwide. For this episode of Entre Líneas, I sat down with John to explore where Latin America stands in the real-time payments revolution — and what banks in the region need to do to get ahead of it. John will also be joining us on July 8 as a panelist at BAFT's upcoming Spanish-language webinar, so consider this a preview of the thinking he will bring to that room.
When we talk about real-time payments and cross-border payments today, how do we describe the trends? Is LATAM ahead or behind?
If you look at the market globally, the direction is very clear: domestic real-time payments are already mainstream in many countries, and the next phase is connecting those domestic real-time ecosystems into cross-border use cases.
What has happened so far is that countries have built very successful local instant-payment rails, but cross-border has remained more fragmented because it involves FX, compliance, messaging standards, settlement models and different regulatory regimes. So the trend today is not really about whether real-time works domestically — that is already proven — it is about how to make cross-border payments feel more like domestic real-time payments.
On LATAM specifically, I would say the region is ahead in domestic innovation and customer adoption, but still in the early stages of true cross-border real-time interoperability. Systems such as Pix have shown how quickly consumers and businesses adopt instant payments when the experience is simple, low-cost and always available. The World Bank noted that fast-payment volumes across 11 Latin America and Caribbean countries rose from 620 million in 2017 to 79.8 billion in 2024 — and fast payments reached 45% of digital payment volume in 2024, surpassing cards for the first time. That is a major signal.
So my view is: LATAM is not behind on the demand side or the domestic rail side. Where the opportunity still exists is in connecting that domestic success to international payment flows in a scalable, compliant and bank-friendly way.
From the global networking side, what's the most complex thing today when connecting local RTPs with cross-border flows?
The hardest part is not the payment message itself. The hardest part is aligning everything around the message.
To make cross-border real-time work, you need five things to operate together at the same time: identity and account validation, compliance screening, FX transparency, liquidity availability, and final settlement certainty. If any one of those is weak, the payment stops being truly real-time.
Domestic RTP systems are built for local rules, local data standards and local operating hours or scheme requirements. Cross-border introduces a second layer of complexity: different jurisdictions, different compliance expectations, different data requirements, and often different payout formats between bank accounts, wallets and cards.
That is why interoperability and standardization matter so much. Swift has been very focused on enabling interoperability between instant-payment systems, and BIS Project Nexus is built around the same principle — one standard way for payment systems to connect rather than creating a separate custom bridge every time. BIS reports that more than 70 countries now have instant-payment systems, and Nexus is designed so they can be linked to support cross-border payments in under 60 seconds in many cases.
So the biggest complexity is really this: how do we connect local RTP rails to global payment requirements without recreating fragmentation every time we add a new country or corridor?
Where do you see today the biggest bottleneck for real-time payments to go cross-border? Regulation, compliance?
Yes — regulation and compliance are absolutely part of it, but I would frame the bottleneck more broadly as trust at scale.
Domestic instant payments work because everybody in that ecosystem already understands the rules, the participants and the risk model. Cross-border is harder because banks need to trust not only the payment rail, but also the party on the other side, the compliance controls, the data quality, the funding model and the settlement process.
The three biggest bottlenecks today are: first, fragmented regulatory and supervisory expectations across markets; second, inconsistent or incomplete payment data; and third, liquidity and prefunding economics.
The FSB's 2025 progress report is very telling here: it notes that there has been only slight improvement in global KPIs so far and that it is unlikely satisfactory global improvements will be achieved on the original 2027 timetable. That tells us the policy work is progressing, but the market still has work to do in implementation.
So yes, compliance is a bottleneck — but the deeper issue is how to create a trusted operating framework where banks can move faster without increasing fraud, sanctions, AML or operational risk.
Can you share a specific case where cross-border payments are already operating almost in real time?
Yes — there are already real examples today.
One clear model is where cross-border payments are routed through established international frameworks and then delivered into domestic instant-payment systems or local payout infrastructures. Swift has already helped enable certain cross-border payments into Europe to reach beneficiaries in seconds through seamless connection to domestic instant-payment systems. Swift also points to bilateral linkages in Asia — Singapore–Thailand, Singapore–India and Singapore–Malaysia — as proof that real-time cross-border use cases are already live.
From TerraPay's perspective, this is exactly where the market is moving: the sending bank does not need to rebuild everything from scratch. It can leverage trusted cross-border messaging and connectivity, and then connect into local last-mile infrastructure — bank accounts, wallets or other domestic rails — to achieve near-real-time payout in local currency.
So the use case is no longer theoretical. The real challenge now is scale: how do we take those corridor-by-corridor successes and industrialize them across many countries, many banks and many payment types?
In the next 2–3 years, what change is going to be key to making real-time payments become massive?
The key change will be interoperability with standardized data.
Speed alone is no longer enough. To make real-time cross-border payments truly massive, the industry needs common standards that allow payment systems, banks, wallets and compliance tools to work together more seamlessly. That is why ISO 20022 matters so much. Since November 2025, ISO 20022 is now the global standard language for cross-border payments, bringing richer and more structured data to improve efficiency, compliance and customer experience.
The second change is broader access. More domestic schemes need to open for inbound cross-border flows in a controlled and compliant way.
And the third is better orchestration of FX, liquidity and fraud controls in the background, so that the customer experiences a simple instant payment without seeing the complexity underneath.
If those three things come together — interoperability, standards and scalable trust — then real-time cross-border payments move from selected corridors into mainstream banking.
If you had to leave a message for the audience, what should you start doing today to be ready for this new world of payments?
My message to banks and payment providers would be this: do not treat real-time payments and cross-border payments as two separate strategies anymore.
Start with three actions now.
First, upgrade your data and messaging readiness — especially around ISO 20022 and structured payment information.
Second, identify the corridors and customer use cases where real-time cross-border matters most, rather than trying to do everything at once.
Third, choose partners and infrastructures that let you combine global reach, compliance and local last-mile access.
The future is not about replacing banks. It is about helping banks extend their reach into real-time, multi-rail, cross-border payments in a way that remains trusted, compliant and scalable.
The winners in this next phase will be the institutions that connect domestic speed with global interoperability.
One of the projects we are building together is educational content on payment rails for the financial industry. What is the most important concept banking professionals in Latin America need to understand right now — the one that will matter most over the next 3 years?
The concept that will matter most is this: the payment rail is now a strategic choice, not a given.
For decades, banks inherited the rails they used — correspondent banking, SWIFT messaging, card networks — without necessarily choosing them. That era is ending.
Today, a bank in Latin America has real options: traditional correspondent banking, ISO 20022-enabled messaging, instant-payment domestic rails, digital wallets, stablecoin infrastructure, and emerging interoperability frameworks like BIS Nexus.
The question is no longer "how do we use the system?" — it is "which system do we use, and for what?"
Banking professionals in the region need to understand the architecture of each rail: how it settles, who controls it, what compliance it requires, what it costs per transaction, and where it breaks down.
That is not a technology question — it is a business strategy question. And it is one that will define which institutions lead the next decade of cross-border payments in Latin America and the Caribbean.