Bilateral payment links can prove that cross-border interoperability works, but each new connection also adds another set of agreements, standards and supervisory relationships to maintain. At some point, adding country pairs one by one becomes less efficient than building a common network. Regional and multilateral initiatives are testing that alternative through shared platforms and settlement layers. The roundtable examines when bilateral connectivity should give way to multilateral architecture, how such systems should be governed and what individual countries must retain control over when infrastructure becomes shared. It closes by identifying the smallest credible cross-regional network that could demonstrate the model in practice.

Many promising financial companies do not fail because the product is weak. They fail between early proof and meaningful scale. Growth capital becomes harder to secure, institutional partners hesitate to integrate with younger firms, and entering each new market can require rebuilding relationships, compliance processes and distribution from scratch. This roundtable focuses on that scale gap. It asks which forms of capital are missing after the early stages, what would make banks and other large institutions more willing to partner with growth-stage providers, and which shared infrastructure or market-access mechanisms could reduce the cost of expanding across emerging markets.