In our September piece, we looked at the internal dynamics — the stakeholders, the approval processes, and how to build a business case that moves through a bank. That article assumed something: that the people inside the bank already understood the urgency. This one is about why, in 2025, that assumption is finally becoming true.
For a long time, international payments sat near the bottom of most banks' technology roadmaps. It was complex, it was expensive to modernise, and the revenue at risk felt abstract. That calculation has changed — not because banks have become bolder, but because the external pressure has become impossible to ignore.
The challenger effect
The numbers are now well-documented. In Australia, Wise has grown to over one million customers and Revolut to more than 600,000 — almost entirely at the expense of incumbent banks. These aren't fringe users or early adopters. They are mainstream retail and SME customers who found a better experience and moved.
The revenue attached to those relationships isn't just the FX margin on the transfers. It's the associated current accounts, the business banking relationships, the lending that follows customers who feel well-served. International payments has become a front-door experience — and banks with a poor one are losing the relationship, not just the transaction.
Why the cost of doing nothing has risen
Banks have historically been good at absorbing slow-moving competitive pressure. The switching costs are high, the relationships are sticky, and the alternatives were limited. None of those defences are as strong as they were.
Switching costs have fallen. Regulatory change — open banking, faster payments infrastructure — has made it easier to move. The alternatives have become more capable and more trusted. And the demographic shift is real: younger customers who've grown up with mobile-first, real-time everything are not going to accept a three-day international transfer.
The CFO who was comfortable deferring international payments modernisation in 2019 is looking at a very different set of numbers today.
What banks are actually doing about it
The response we're seeing from banks is more sophisticated than it was even two years ago. The conversation has shifted from "do we need to fix this?" to "what's the fastest and lowest-risk way to fix this without disrupting everything else?"
That's where the build-versus-partner question becomes central. Banks are increasingly recognising that building their own payments infrastructure is not the right answer — not because they couldn't, but because the time, capital and risk involved don't make sense when proven infrastructure is available.
The institutions moving fastest are those that have separated the question of the customer experience (which they own and control) from the infrastructure question (which they don't need to own). Cymonz provides the latter. The bank keeps everything else.
The window is open, but not indefinitely
There's a version of this story that ends well for the banks that move now. They recapture lost customers, they defend existing relationships, and they launch a payments experience that competes on equal terms with the challengers. That version requires moving in the next 12 to 24 months.
The version that doesn't end well is the one where the window closes — where challenger brands become the default for a generation of customers, and the cost of winning them back is much higher than the cost of not losing them in the first place.
We're still in the first version. For now.