I think this may be an insightful comment.

It's not for lack of trying that traditional, "database driven" cross-border payments are costly and unreliable. SWIFT have thrown technology at this problem: GPI, Swift Go, ISO20022, etc.

Unfortunately the ecosystem has an extremely weak technical culture. Banks rarely follow the standards as written – your perfectly crafted API payment may be re-keyed by a low-paid human operator on a slow, buggy UI written a decade ago.

I could believe that the developer experience and technical standards of the participants is where the value lies right now.

The one thing I'm not sure on is to what extent those ecosystems depend on reduced regulatory scrutiny compared to banks.