TechRound Team November 12, 2026

By Anupam Pahuja, Chief Business Officer, Nium

A supplier waiting for payment usually has a simple question: when will the money arrive? For the business sending it, the answer should be just as simple. Tracking a transfer in real time, confirming delivery, and knowing the upfront cost ought to be routine parts of trading internationally.

These are hardly new expectations, yet meeting them can be a persistent challenge. New forms of money, including stablecoins and tokenised deposits, offer further opportunities to improve that experience. But adding ways to pay without the infrastructure to connect them can leave businesses with more complexity to manage.

Finance teams need to carefully consider how each new option fits into their existing work. More choice is useful only if the benefits justify any additional systems or processes they have to build and manage. Research from Nium and Celent shows there is still considerable room to improve the service businesses receive from their banking partners.

Surveying 210 businesses and 210 banks across 17 markets, the study found that only a third of businesses are satisfied with the cross-border payment service they receive from their bank. Meanwhile, 64% already use at least one non-bank method for outgoing international transfers.

Businesses already have alternatives. As that choice grows, financial institutions need to show how their services will make payments easier to manage.

 

What The Middle East Findings Tell Us About The Future Of Money

 

Alongside businesses’ use of non-bank payment methods, the research points to changes in the forms of money banks expect to use for cross-border payments. The Middle East findings of the survey covered 40 banks and 40 businesses in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.

Surveyed banks expect new forms of money, including stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies, to account for 20.7% of their outgoing business-to-business cross-border payment volume by 2035, up from 3.4% in 2025. Within that total, the anticipated stablecoin share rises from 1.6% to 10.4%.

These figures reflect the surveyed banks’ expectations, rather than a guaranteed path for adoption. Some 65% of regional banks believe these forms of money could help expand their payment coverage, while 60% see potential to strengthen their competitiveness. For business customers, wider coverage could be valuable. Whether it also simplifies their payments will depend on how these options work alongside the services they already use.

 

Solving The Whole Payment, Not Just The Middle Mile

 

The banks’ responses also show how much work remains before those expectations become everyday services. Four in ten regional banks are experimenting with or operating solutions involving new forms of money, yet 53% struggle to build a clear business case and half believe the underlying technology is not yet mature enough.

For a bank assessing whether to introduce a new payment method, the business case needs to account for the service it can ultimately deliver to customers. Faster settlement may be a benefit, but the bank also needs to consider how currency conversion, local delivery and payment reporting will work.

If those steps leave customers arranging conversions from stablecoins to fiat separately or manually matching payments to invoices, the proposed service may be less useful than its settlement speed suggests. Assessing the entire payment journey end to end gives the bank a clearer basis for deciding whether the investment is worthwhile.

Making The Connections Work

 

Contrary to the common misconception, financial institutions do not need to rebuild their infrastructure and workflows from scratch to modernise. Instead, the priority must be enabling existing banking systems to connect interoperably with the optimal rails for each payment and corridor across correspondent banking networks and their alternatives, messaging standards, emerging rails, and local clearing networks.

The various systems need to work together to ensure payments and payment data can pass reliably between established banking networks and newer payment services, and that the beneficiary receives the exact amount they expect in local currency.

For example, a business paying an overseas supplier in Hong Kong with stablecoin will need their payout delivered to their domestic bank account in HKD. Seamless conversion and guaranteed local delivery are basic requirements, whether the funds travel across borders via traditional rails, real-time payment networks or stablecoins.

 

What Businesses Should Expect

 

Banks remain foundational to global commerce; 69% of businesses in our global survey still regard them as essential partners. But as newer payment methods emerge alongside traditional banking channels, businesses need a partner that can bring these options together with less, not more, complexity.

Greater choice should not come at the expense of the fundamentals of a good cross-border payment. Can the provider reach the required markets? Are fees and exchange rates clear upfront? Can businesses track payments and know when funds will arrive? And when something goes wrong, who takes responsibility for resolving it and how quickly? These practical questions matter as much as the range of payment methods on offer.

Businesses should have more choice over how they pay internationally without having to act as systems integrators to benefit from it. As new and compliant ways to move money more efficiently become available, helping businesses navigate them while delivering a consistent, reliable payment experience should be part of the service that banking and financial service partners provide.

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