The Visa white paper highlights how cross-border payments remain costly, slow, and opaque under the correspondent banking model, with fees layered across multiple banks, regulatory checks, and FX conversion uncertainties. Businesses demand faster, transparent solutions, with 82% of banks citing payment tracking as critical. Issues include 3–5-day settlement times, hidden fees, data loss, and high nostro account costs ($27k per account annually in the U.S.). Innovations like account-to-account models and permissioned networks offer alternatives, reducing fees, improving transparency, and enabling real-time settlement. Banks must embrace these to compete with fintech challengers.

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