Originally published in E-Finance & Payments Law & Policy, September 2016.

Frictionless payments have long been a goal of the global payments industry. Everyone wants to push a button and instantaneously complete a transaction and give or get immediate access to the funds. While payments have been moving cross-border electronically for decades, efforts to speed up, enhance or blend payment methods run in to a sort of data communications Tower of Babel. In the United States, while there is sufficient standardisation for the payment card, ACH and wire networks to operate separately, true real-time crossborder, cross-payment type and cross-payment platform communications have many technical barriers requiring intricate product and service design and implementation.