From SWIFT to Stablecoins: A Practical Guide to the Payment Rails Powering Global Business

International payments used to be synonymous with SWIFT wires and waiting days for funds to arrive. Today, finance teams have a growing toolbox of payment rails to move money faster, cheaper, and with more control - but the choice has never been more complex.

This article builds on the basics of SWIFT and correspondent banking, and steps back to look at the broader landscape of rails available to businesses that send and receive money around the world.

What are payment rails?

Payment rails are the underlying networks and rules that money travels on between a payer and a payee. They include the technical infrastructure (like ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, card networks and blockchains) as well as the institutions, standards, and regulations that govern how transfers are initiated, cleared, and settled.

Some rails are domestic, built for a specific country or region (such as ACH in the US, SEPA in the Eurozone, Faster Payments in the UK). Others are global overlays, like SWIFT for bank-to-bank messaging, the chard schemes for consumer and SME spending, or public blockchains that anyone can connect to.

For business leasers, the key point is that "sending an international payment" is often shorthand for orchestrating several different rails in sequence, and there is usually more than one way to get money from A to B. Choosing the right rail can have a direct impact on cost, speed, working capital and customer experience.

The main payment rails businesses use

At a high level, most cross-border payment flows today rely on six broad categories of rails. The table below summarises how they compare.

The rest of the article unpacks how each of these rails works, where it shines and where it falls short for modern businesses.

SWIFT and correspondent banking: the legacy backbone

SWIFT is often mistaken for a payment system in its own right, but it is best understood as a secure messaging layer connecting more than 11,000 institutions worldwide. When a bank sends a “SWIFT transfer”, it is transmitting standardised messages (such as MT or ISO 20022) to instruct debits and credits between correspondent accounts held at different banks.​

Funds actually move across each country’s domestic high‑value settlement systems, such as Fedwire in the US, CHAPS in the UK or CHATS in Hong Kong. Because a typical cross‑border payment can involve several correspondent banks, each taking a fee and applying its own FX rate, the result is often higher cost, less transparency and settlement times of one to five business days.​

For large corporates and banks, the strengths of SWIFT‑based correspondent banking are global reach, standardisation, and the ability to send funds virtually anywhere with a bank account. For SMEs and digital businesses, however, SWIFT wires can feel slow and expensive, especially for smaller, frequent payments where fees and FX margins quickly erode margins.

Domestic batch rails: ACH, SEPA and friends

Domestic batch rails like ACH in the US and SEPA Credit Transfer in the Eurozone are built to move large volumes of low‑value payments at minimal cost. Payments are typically processed in scheduled batches, meaning they clear and settle on a same‑day or next‑day basis rather than in real time.​

For businesses, these rails are ideal for predictable flows such as payroll, supplier runs, insurance claims and subscription billing. They are inexpensive, reliable, and deeply embedded in domestic banking infrastructure, making them a natural choice whenever both payer and payee have local bank accounts.​

On their own, batch rails are not a cross‑border solution. However, fintechs and virtual account providers increasingly use local batch rails on each side of a transaction to recreate a cross‑border payment experience without sending a traditional international wire. For example, a customer in the US might pay a local ACH transfer into a USD virtual account, while the platform pays out via SEPA to a supplier in Europe.​

Real‑time and instant payment systems

Real‑time payment (RTP) systems are the newer generation of bank rails that settle transfers within seconds, 24/7. Examples include Faster Payments in the UK, SEPA Instant in Europe, FedNow and the private‑sector RTP network in the US, UPI in India, and PIX in Brazil.​

Instant rails are transforming domestic payments by enabling immediate payroll advances, on‑demand payouts to gig workers, just‑in‑time supplier payments and near‑instant merchant settlement in supported markets. Costs tend to be low and predictable, and always‑on availability means businesses are less constrained by banking hours and cut‑off times.​

Like batch rails, these systems are primarily domestic or regional, but they play a growing role in cross‑border flows when combined with local‑to‑local models. A platform can collect funds via an instant rail in one country, hold or convert them, and then use another instant rail to payout locally in the destination market, giving both sides a “local experience” with global reach.

Card networks: global acceptance rails

Card networks like Visa and Mastercard operate some of the most widely used payment rails on the planet, connecting issuers, acquirers, merchants and consumers across more than 200 countries and territories. When a customer pays with a card, a complex authorisation and clearing process takes place in seconds, while actual settlement between banks happens later, often on a T+1 or T+2 basis.​

For businesses, the main benefit of card rails is global acceptance and conversion uplift – customers are familiar with paying by card, and schemes handle much of the risk, dispute and FX machinery behind the scenes. The trade‑off is cost: merchant service fees and interchange can be significant, especially for cross‑border or card‑not‑present transactions.​

Card rails are a natural fit for B2C and SMB commerce at the checkout, but they are less efficient for large B2B invoices, payroll or marketplace payouts where bank transfers or alternative rails can deliver better economics. Increasingly, B2B networks and virtual account providers blend card and bank rails – for example, giving businesses the option to pay suppliers via local transfers or spend from the same balance on corporate cards.​

Wallets, local payment methods and closed‑loop systems

Digital wallets and local alternative payment methods (APMs) sit on top of traditional bank and card rails but create their own closed‑loop ecosystems. Examples include PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay and a long list of regional e‑wallets and bank transfer schemes tailored to specific markets.​

From a business perspective, these rails matter because customers increasingly expect to pay with their preferred local methods. In Europe, SEPA transfers and local wallets are widely used; in Asia, QR‑code wallets and super‑apps dominate in some markets; in Latin America, schemes like PIX in Brazil or cash‑voucher networks in Mexico fill gaps in card penetration.​

Accepting and reconciling dozens of local methods can quickly become operationally heavy if each is integrated separately. Payment service providers and fintech platforms abstract this complexity by aggregating many APMs into a single interface and payout ledger, even though the underlying funds still move over a mix of card, ACH, instant and wallet rails.​

Blockchain and stablecoin rails

Blockchain and stablecoin rails represent a newer but rapidly maturing layer of infrastructure for cross‑border payments. Fiat‑backed stablecoins such as USDC and USDT are designed to track the value of a reference currency like the US dollar, while moving over public or permissioned blockchains.​

For businesses, the appeal of stablecoin rails lies in their combination of near‑instant settlement, 24/7 availability and potentially lower fees than traditional cross‑border wires or cards. Funds can move between wallets in seconds or minutes, even across time zones and outside banking hours, then be converted back into local fiat and paid out via domestic bank rails.​

Early adopters include payment service providers, fintechs, exporters and remote‑work platforms that need to move funds quickly across multiple currencies and regions. However, businesses must still consider regulatory treatment, counterparty risk, treasury policies and accounting implications before adopting blockchain‑based rails at scale. In practice, most use cases today combine stablecoin rails with traditional rails such as ACH, SEPA, SWIFT and instant systems via regulated intermediaries.

​How cross‑border payments combine multiple rails

In reality, most international business payments are not “pure SWIFT”, “pure ACH” or “pure blockchain”. They are multi‑rail journeys that string together different domestic and international systems to optimise speed, cost and access.

​Consider a simple example: a company in Hong Kong paying a supplier in Germany. Traditionally, the Hong Kong bank would send a SWIFT message through one or more correspondent banks, which in turn move funds via local high‑value systems before the money finally lands in the supplier’s EUR account.

A fintech or virtual‑account‑based approach might instead:

• Collect HKD into a local account or wallet in Hong Kong over CHATS or another domestic rail.

• Convert HKD to EUR at competitive FX rates within a multi‑currency ledger.

• Pay out EUR to the supplier via SEPA Credit Transfer or SEPA Instant, turning a cross‑border transaction into two local ones.

In a more advanced hybrid flow, a business could move treasury balances between regions using stablecoin rails, then disburse locally via ACH, SEPA or instant schemes to beneficiaries. The end customer still sees a simple “bank transfer received”, while the orchestrator chooses whichever rails offer the best combination of cost, speed and reliability.

How virtual accounts help businesses ride the right rails

Virtual accounts have become a powerful tool for simplifying multi‑rail payments without opening and managing dozens of traditional bank accounts. A virtual account provider assigns businesses local account details in multiple currencies and countries, allowing them to receive funds “like a local” via rails such as ACH, Fedwire, SEPA or Faster Payments, even without a physical entity in each market.​

Once funds arrive, the platform can hold balances, convert between currencies at competitive rates and send payments out via whichever rails make most sense – from SWIFT and domestic wires to ACH, SEPA, instant schemes and, increasingly, stablecoin rails. The business sees a unified ledger and a single interface, while the provider handles the routing logic behind the scenes.​

Solutions like Currenxie’s Global Account give businesses access to unique local bank account numbers in over 40 markets, covering major currencies such as USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, HKD, SGD, IDR and more. This allows exporters to collect from overseas buyers via local transfers instead of expensive SWIFT wires, and pay suppliers via domestic rails from the same multi‑currency account.​

For finance teams, the outcome is not just lower transaction costs, but also faster settlement, better FX control and clearer visibility over global cash positions – all without needing to become experts in every underlying rail. As cross‑border commerce continues to grow, the question is no longer “SWIFT or not?”, but rather “which combination of rails gives my business the best outcome for this payment?”.​

By understanding the landscape outlined here, businesses are better placed to ask the right questions, choose the right partners and turn payment rails from a hidden cost centre into a strategic advantage.

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