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.

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.