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Digital assets

July 6, 2026

 

The interoperable payments stack: How policymakers should think about a converging payments ecosystem

As stablecoins, AI and real-time payments become more interconnected, a shift is needed from overseeing individual systems to safeguarding trust across the entire ecosystem.

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Raisa Sheynberg

Vice President, Government Affairs and Policy, Mastercard

Payments are no longer evolving in parallel. They are converging into a more interoperable stack.

Three developments are driving that shift. Stablecoins are maturing into regulated payment instruments, particularly for cross-border value transfer. Artificial intelligence is changing how transactions are initiated, authenticated and executed, moving from supporting human decision-making toward increasingly autonomous, machine-to-machine action. And domestic real-time payment systems are expanding their reach both within national markets and, gradually, across borders.

Taken together, these developments are creating a payments environment in which previously distinct systems increasingly work together to enable faster, more efficient payments.

This convergence is already visible in how transactions move. A payment may originate with a card, route through a real-time account-to-account rail, use a stablecoin leg for cross-border transfer, and be initiated or optimized by an AI agent. As interoperability increases, overseeing each system on a stand-alone basis becomes less workable. Operational failures, fraud events, cybersecurity vulnerabilities or compliance weaknesses in one layer of the stack can now cascade across others.

The policy challenge, therefore, is no longer how to regulate individual rails in isolation, but how to preserve trust, resilience and accountability throughout an increasingly interconnected ecosystem. Policymakers should respond through a holistic framework, not through fragmented rules designed separately for each payment system.

 

The regulatory implications of convergence are becoming harder to ignore

Over the past decade, policymakers and regulators have addressed each wave of payments innovation in turn, relying on two durable principles. The first is a level playing field for all ecosystem participants, whether they are incumbents or newcomers. The second is the idea that activities with the same level of risk should lead to the same regulatory outcomes and therefore be governed by equivalent oversight regimes. Those principles remain the right starting point. Regulation should focus on a payment instrument’s function and its associated risks, regardless of the underlying technology. The challenge now is how to apply those principles across interacting systems, not just within them.

Digital assets and stablecoins offer an instructive recent case study in how to appropriately regulate a new technologically driven payments innovation. After considerable deliberation, authorities settled on bringing digital assets inside the regulatory perimeter to reduce regulatory arbitrage and ensure consumer protections. Effectively, regulators landed on extending established regulatory principles and practices to new payment system participants.

Where new technologies perform payment functions, they should be subject to the same expectations that protect users and preserve confidence in the broader ecosystem. The same logic should extend across the emerging payment stack as newer payment intermediaries, orchestration layers and AI-enabled actors that challenge and evolve established payments constructs become embedded in transaction flows.

The next phase of payments innovation, therefore, calls for a more integrated policy approach. Policymakers should strive to: 

  • Promote interoperability and adoption of scalable technical standards. Industry efforts to develop technical standards and certification programs to ensure that newer technologies are not developed in silos are already well underway. Policymakers can extend these efforts by setting standards requiring interoperable protocols as well as open API standards that ensure transactions can move across disparate digital wallets, bank rails and card networks without introducing security gaps.
  • Ensure cybersecurity and resiliency are at the core of oversight frameworks. A more interconnected payments environment also means that cybersecurity and resiliency are central to the soundness of the entire ecosystem. Policymakers should ensure that cybersecurity standards reflect the modern and dynamic threat landscape rather than the established defensive approach of erecting a firewall around a business.
  • Incentivize ecosystem-wide threat information sharing among financial institutions, fintechs and network providers to share real-time anonymous data on fraud patterns, digital identity breaches and system vulnerabilities, specifically those involving AI deployment. Information sharing on cyber vulnerabilities and fraud patterns across industries and borders is increasingly important, as threat actors tend to exploit information asymmetries, adapt much faster than any individual institution or industry with new attacks, and are often able to exploit different payment rails to move illicit funds across borders and evade law enforcement.  
  • Modernize anti-money laundering (AML) rules to reflect the evolving nature of threats and vulnerabilities in the financial system. Updated AML regimes should consider new threat actors and exploitation paths, such as fraud and scam syndicates and AI-enabled automated activity that traditional compliance programs are presently ill-equipped to manage. Moreover, regulators should consider whether and how AML obligations apply to newer payments ecosystem participants, such as intermediaries. 

 

For policymakers, the task ahead is not to pick winners by favoring one rail, provider or technology over another. It is to create the conditions for a payments landscape in which multiple systems can coexist, compete and connect responsibly. 

Raisa Sheynberg

     

Interoperable payments will depend on securing trust across ecosystems

Stablecoins, AI-enabled payments, real-time rails and other newer models may improve cost, speed or efficiency, but they will scale together only if consumers, businesses, financial institutions and policymakers are confident that these systems are secure, resilient and governed by clear rules. In other words, adoption at scale will be determined not only by technical capability but by trust in the ecosystem as a whole.

For Mastercard, that challenge is not abstract. Every day, we help connect consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments through a secure global network. Our role in a converging payments environment is to make trust tangible at scale — through security, standards, fraud prevention, identity capabilities and network governance that allow transactions to move safely across rails and technologies.

As new payment models emerge, our focus is not only on enabling more ways to pay, but on ensuring those experiences are supported by the protections, accountability and interoperability needed to earn confidence from all participants. In our view, trust is not a constraint on innovation; it is the condition that allows innovation to scale.

For policymakers, the task ahead is not to pick winners by favoring one rail, provider or technology over another. It is to create the conditions for a payments landscape in which multiple systems can coexist, compete and connect responsibly. And to that end, regulation should avoid distorting competition through overly prescriptive guidance, pricing requirements or favoring domestic players over international ones.

Mastercard believes the strongest payments ecosystems will be those that combine innovation with trust, openness with safeguards, and new capabilities with broad usability at scale. The payment stack is becoming more diverse, more intelligent and more interconnected. Policy should evolve accordingly.

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