The payments industry has evolved into a core digital utility and a significant growth engine in its own right. The scale is rising, rails are modernizing, and enterprises now expect payments, treasury, and data to function as a single system. Global payments revenues reached approximately USD 2.2 trillion in 2022 and are projected to exceed USD 3 trillion by 2027, underscoring both resilience and the innovation potential. 

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Real-time is moving from feature to baseline. In Europe, the Instant Payments Regulation hardwires parity between instant and non-instant credit transfer charges. It introduces payee verification, pushing the market toward safer account-to-account experiences at scale.  

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Cross-border modernization is finally breaking through. The BIS-led Project Nexus has completed a blueprint to interlink domestic instant payment systems, with India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand preparing for live implementation and Indonesia as a special observer. The aim is to establish a single connection model that routes payments in seconds across participating networks, thereby simplifying today’s web of bilateral links.  

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Merchants and platforms are re-architecting payments around software lifecycles. The winning pattern is modular and API-first. Acceptance, payouts, and treasury services are assembled into domain-specific flows, with orchestration that can swap providers, route transactions based on cost or reach, and expose clean operational data to finance teams. 

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Risk and trust are being rebuilt into the flow. Verification of payee, mandated in Europe, reduces misdirection and social engineering. Daily screening rules move sanctions checks from transaction time to continuous user vetting, relieving real-time bottlenecks while maintaining tight controls. The direction is clear. Safer instant payments at the same or lower price point will become the expectation, not the exception.  

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Data is now the leverage point. The organizations that treat every payment event as a signal for cash positioning, FX, receivables, and lifecycle automation remove manual reconciliation and shorten working capital cycles. Virtual accounts and local IBAN constructs enable enterprises to centralize liquidity while maintaining entity-level control. The result is simpler banking footprints, faster closes, and cleaner audits. 

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The state of the art is therefore not a single rail or product. It is an integrated operating model that combines instant domestic rails, smarter cross-border links, embedded risk controls, and financial data that aligns with the business’ operations. Leaders will measure success by time to value, quality of cash visibility, ability to re-route, and the precision of their compliance automation. External tailwinds help. Market growth remains solid, regulation is driving convergence in safety and pricing, and cross-border initiatives are simplifying interoperability.  

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COMO Pay reflects that direction. It serves as the user-friendly, real-time control center for payments and cash management, designed for clarity and control across multi-currency operations. It anchors account subscription bundles and usage for SEPA and SWIFT transactions, FX, and AML modules, and sits alongside In-House Banking to provide enterprises with a single environment and unified view.