EXCLUSIVE: "Running Every Last Mile" - Allison Shonerd, Bank of America in 'The Paytech Magazine'

Bank of America’s Cross-border Real-time Payments Solution has proved it can sprint over legacy rails. Allison Shonerd explains the hurdles her industry faces to get all international transactions across the line in seconds

Every journey begins with a single step, but it’s the last mile that continues to frustrate the efficiency of cross-border payments. So, when Bank of America announced it had successfully completed an instant cross-border payment using Swift connectivity and domestic real-time rails, it represented a crucial waymark.

Revealed at Sibos 2026 in Miami, the transfer was initiated by partner bank Bradesco in Mexico and arrived in the beneficiary’s account via Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System. An alternative way to initiate a payment using Bank of America’s CashPro platform will also be made available next year.

The new Cross-border Real-Time Payments Solution is aimed first at clients that send large volumes of small amounts, such as payments to gig workers and e-commerce vendors. And it underlines BoA’s desire to build on what already exists to meet industry targets and customer expectations around international money flows.

“We see an opportunity to make our correspondent banking infrastructure interoperable with our investments in domestic real-time payment schemes,” says Allison Shonerd, Global Head of Clearing at Bank of America.

“We’re working to bring consistent, predictable 24/7 experiences to customers, regardless of how they initiate payments or the value of their transactions.”

Beneficiary blues

The new service offers real-time tracking and delivers the full principal amount to the beneficiary. Configured to work with instant payment networks, including Faster Payments in the UK, SPEI in Mexico and India’s UPI, it avoids the need for clients to establish new connectivity or accounting processes.

Bank of America’s Global Head of Payment Solutions, Mark Monaco, has argued this is crucial, since corporate treasurers ‘don’t want to manage a patchwork of domestic schemes market-by-market; they need banking partners to absorb that complexity’.

The near-instant delivery of funds to the recipient in the pilot was significant, since globally it’s the release of funds by a beneficiary’s bank where friction exists and causes efficiency targets to be missed.

Swift reported two years ago that 90 per cent of payments sent over its network were arriving at the beneficiary’s bank within one hour. But that isn’t the same as the funds being available for the beneficiary to spend.

Regulatory and domestic processing issues mean their release can take days.

And while Swift measures the efficiency of transactions over its own network, there are many other global payment corridors beyond its reach. In an attempt to tackle liquidity bottlenecks caused by correspondent banking, the G20’s Financial Stability Board five years ago set banks global targets for 2027. The headlines were that 75 per cent of wholesale and retail payments must be credited within one hour of initiation, and the average cost of a cross-border retail payment must be no more than one per cent of the transaction value.

This year, the FSB warned these targets would be missed since, for many people, costs remained too high (four per cent for peer-to-peer payments in sub-Saharan Africa, for example) and clearance was still measured in days.

In 2024, Swift had said the final domestic stage of a payment journey – the crucial ‘last mile’ – could account for 80 per cent of total processing time. It warned ‘beneficiary-side crediting remains a key focus area... local regulatory requirements, FX controls, operating hours and manual processes still account for a large share of end-to-end payment delays’.

Making everything 24/7

So, what is holding up progress for banks generally? Setting aside issues of national regulatory friction, Shonerd says that, at an operational level, achieving real-time cross-border payments involves more than the payment rails.

“It’s about bringing the entire operating model that supports payments into the 24/7, seamless way of working that our customers expect in a global, always-on economy,” she explains. “That means extending it to compliance, operations and customer service, and doing that comprehensively can be a challenge.

“Also, when you’re operating ‘always-on’, the experience is only as strong as the weakest link. Today you have applications with downtime or maintenance windows, and times when you can perform upgrades and release enhancements. All of that has to be rationalised: you need ways of maintaining and enhancing your capabilities while staying online all the time. And that extends across the entire operating model, people and technology.

“So it’s a very interesting and exciting challenge to shed the buffers we’ve had around operating hours and cut-off times, but it does present a real challenge for staying resilient.”

Shonerd adds that the global adoption of Swift’s messaging standard ISO 20022 means the foundation for automation has been laid, and the risk of fraud and errors is being tackled as a result. But she cautions there’s still ‘a long way to go’ before the standard’s full potential is achieved across the industry, due to regulatory friction on a national level.

“ISO 20022 has given the industry a common language we can use to speak to each other,” she says. “But in reality, there are still many local dialects we have to take into account. 

“On the one hand, ISO 20022 has given us the opportunity to become more interoperable. As high-value payment schemes and domestic real-time payment schemes all move onto this common language, it opens up more opportunities to bridge between the two.

“It’s also given us a vehicle for exchanging rich information in payment messages, and for finding ways to be more automated and optimised in how we process payments.

“But there’s still a long way to go, and there’s still work to be done to realise the full value of ISO 20022.”

Running in parallel

Bank of America’s new solution uses multiple international and domestic payment systems, and the bank isn’t alone in this approach. But it’s just one of many options for moving money internationally, with non-fiat digital alternatives being pursued across the industry.

In a research paper by the Bank of America Institute last year, its authors said of stablecoins: “From cross-border to retail transactions, stablecoins can be a cheaper and more efficient option when compared to other consumer payment methods. However, they also introduce challenges, such as irreversible transactions and exposure to depegging [losing their ‘peg’ to the underlying currency or asset], which can impact scalability and stability.”

So where does Shonerd believe tokenised money sits as a real-time cross-border payment solution?

“We certainly see tokenised money as a complementary rail to those that exist today,” she says. “Our existing rails process enormous volumes of value every day, securely and efficiently. But tokenised money may have a really interesting role in extending those capabilities, especially after operating hours, or when we’re trying to rationalise cut-off times and availability.

“So, we see an opportunity to meet customer needs for 24/7 liquidity movement, for example, by bringing tokenised money and traditional rails together into what can become a very seamless and predictable payment experience.”

Ultimately, Bank of America, like many of its peers, is open to pragmatic solutions for getting money to pass through every ‘last mile’ without delay. Shonerd’s vision of where she wants the industry to be by the end of the decade is simple.

“For us, we want cross-border payments to be consistent, transparent and predictable for our customers, across the board,” she says.