Financial infrastructure rarely captures the public imagination. It is too technical, too hidden, too easily mistaken for plumbing. Yet it is precisely in this unseen architecture that some of the most consequential changes in modern finance are now taking shape. In a recent conversation on BFRR, Maha El Dimachki, the new chief executive of GFTN Solutions, offered a rare view into that transformation — and into the slow, deliberate work of redesigning how money moves across borders.
El Dimachki is not a theorist of change. She has spent more than two decades inside the machinery of banking, payments, regulation and central-bank innovation, moving from merchant acquiring and corporate banking into public service roles at the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority, then onward to the BIS Innovation Hub in Singapore. Her career traces the arc of a sector that once treated payments as an operational afterthought and now sees it as one of the defining arenas of financial innovation.
That shift matters because payments, once dismissed as the back office of finance, increasingly sit at the center of everything else. They shape trade, financial inclusion, liquidity, working capital and, ultimately, trust in the system itself. What El Dimachki makes clear is that the future of finance will not be built only by inventing new assets or digitizing old ones. It will depend on whether institutions can make the underlying rails faster, cheaper, more transparent and more resilient.
Why Cross-Border Payments Still Fracture
For all the sophistication of modern markets, sending money across borders often remains surprisingly cumbersome. Domestic instant payment systems have flourished in many countries, delivering real benefits to households and businesses. But once a transaction crosses a national boundary, those gains can evaporate into delays, fees, fragmented data and duplicated checks.
This is the problem Project Nexus set out to address during El Dimachki’s tenure at the BIS Innovation Hub. Its premise was deceptively simple: if countries have already built fast domestic payment systems, why not connect them rather than forcing cross-border transfers to rely on slower, more complex chains of intermediaries?
The answer, as she describes it, is not to discard existing finance but to organize it more intelligently. Nexus offers a multilateral model for linking domestic instant payment systems through a common hub, reducing the need for countless bilateral arrangements. The promise is not just technical elegance. It is the possibility of a payment moving internationally with greater speed, more clarity on cost and less uncertainty over what amount will ultimately arrive.
And yet the conversation resists easy futurism. El Dimachki is careful not to caricature correspondent banking as obsolete. Much of it works, and works well. But its friction points remain real, especially in corridors where remittance costs are high and transparency is limited. In that sense, Nexus is less a revolution than a disciplined attempt to improve what already exists.
Compliance, the Greatest Bottleneck
If there was one theme that emerged with unmistakable force, it was this: the biggest constraint on better cross-border payments may not be the movement of funds itself, but the compliance processes wrapped around it.
Here, El Dimachki’s argument becomes especially compelling. The financial system does not merely need speed; it needs speed without compromising standards. That means sanctions screening, legal checks and regulatory obligations cannot simply be removed. They must be rethought.
Project Mandala explored exactly that terrain. Its ambition was to examine whether compliance requirements could be embedded into a protocol layer, allowing participants to verify that checks had been completed and to attach a privacy-preserving proof to the transaction. In theory, that would reduce duplication across the payment chain and allow institutions to rely more efficiently on validated compliance outcomes without exposing sensitive data.
This is not the kind of innovation that makes headlines in consumer finance. But it may be the kind that matters most. El Dimachki argues, persuasively, that preserving high standards need not mean tolerating avoidable inefficiency. In fact, better technology could strengthen compliance by making it more precise, more timely and less dependent on repetitive manual processes. That is a far more serious vision than the familiar rhetoric of disruption. It suggests a financial system that becomes more robust not by lowering the bar, but by raising its operational intelligence.
The Search for Better Foreign Exchange Rails
The same philosophy underpinned Project Rialto, which turned to another stubborn pain point: foreign exchange clearing and settlement. If Nexus addressed connectivity and Mandala addressed compliance, Rialto examined whether tokenized forms of money could improve the FX leg of cross-border transactions.
The experiment drew on ideas from decentralized finance while keeping its focus squarely on institutional needs. Tokenized central bank money, automated liquidity mechanisms and new models of settlement were all part of the inquiry. But again, the emphasis was not on novelty for its own sake. It was on expanding the menu of workable options.
In that respect, Rialto revealed something essential about the BIS Innovation Hub model. Not every experiment is meant to become a live production system overnight. Some exist to test boundaries, expose limitations and generate insights that can later inform more practical design choices. Innovation, in this telling, is not a straight line from prototype to market. It is a sequence of informed decisions about what should be scaled, what should remain modular and what should be left behind.
From Dialogue to Deployment
El Dimachki’s move to GFTN Solutions marks a transition from experimentation to implementation. If the BIS Innovation Hub was designed to explore what central banks and policymakers should understand, GFTN Solutions appears aimed at answering a different question: how can those insights be translated into functioning ecosystems on the ground?
That work, as she outlines it, rests on three pillars: policy development, public-private collaboration and capacity building. It is a framework that reflects the growing realization that financial innovation is not just about technology stacks or legal reform in isolation. Markets change when institutions learn, when talent is trained, when policymakers engage industry early and when reforms are translated into operational reality.
There is a quiet ambition in that model. GFTN, best known through global forums such as the Singapore FinTech Festival and Point Zero Forum, is now positioning itself not just as a convener of conversations but as an architect of follow-through. That may prove to be one of the more important shifts in international finance: the move from discussing innovation at conferences to building the institutions capable of sustaining it.
A Future Built on Cooperation
Perhaps the most striking insight from the conversation was not about a single project, but about institutional culture. El Dimachki has worked on both sides of the divide: in industry, where firms are often ambitious and impatient; and in regulation, where caution is not a flaw but a duty. Too often, those worlds describe the same challenge in different languages and mistake that difference for opposition.
Her answer is neither naïve nor ideological. Strong markets, she suggests, require both innovation and guardrails, both entrepreneurial energy and regulatory legitimacy. The question is not which side should win. It is whether they can learn to work toward the same outcome with greater clarity and less mistrust.
That may be the deeper story behind the future of digital money and financial infrastructure. The next breakthroughs will not come only from code, nor only from policy, but from the institutions capable of joining the two. In that sense, the future of finance may belong less to the loudest disruptors than to the builders who can turn complex systems into better ones.
