Interoperability depends on more than connecting payment systems. Countries must also trust the identities being verified, the data being exchanged and the institutions carrying responsibility when something fails. Cross-border finance exposes differences in digital identity, KYC, AML/CFT, cybersecurity, privacy and liability frameworks that may be manageable domestically but become serious risks once systems connect. The roundtable focuses on the minimum trust architecture required before two financial ecosystems can interoperate safely. It asks what must be mutually recognised, what data should remain under national control, how users can be verified across jurisdictions and where liability should sit when a cross-border transaction or security control fails.

A sandbox can show that a financial product works under controlled conditions. It does not prove that the product can survive licensing, integrate with existing institutions, win customer trust or expand into another jurisdiction. The harder question is what happens after testing ends. The panel examines the conditions that should allow an innovation to move from experiment to licensed market participant, including infrastructure access, capital, governance and regulatory readiness. It also explores a more difficult possibility: whether successful testing in one credible jurisdiction can reduce the cost of entering another, and what regulators would need to recognise in each other's processes before regulatory portability becomes possible.