Financial infrastructure tends to receive attention only when it fails.
For years, businesses could rely on correspondent banks, established currencies and global financial messaging networks to facilitate international commerce.
Russia’s experience after 2022 demonstrated what happens when those connections become constrained.
Sanctions and restrictions disrupted traditional financial channels available to Russian companies. In response, businesses and intermediaries developed alternative settlement arrangements.
For Dr. Arnold Goossen Rempel, an entrepreneur and international business leader based in Asuncion, Paraguay, the result is not the end of traditional banking.
It is a more fragmented payment landscape.
WHY PAYMENT AGENTS EMERGED
One payment-agent settlement mechanism is relatively straightforward. In practice, a company contracts a payment agent to pay a foreign supplier. It buys the agent’s promissory note in local currency and transfers that note to the agent, so the settlement between the client and agent stays domestic. The agent then uses a partner in the supplier’s country to make the payout in that country’s currency.
The structure can separate settlement into domestic payment legs, but the underlying transaction remains cross-border and subject to applicable sanctions, anti-money-laundering and counterparty rules. The promissory note is not a novel instrument. It records an unconditional obligation to pay a fixed sum, and its use is addressed in legal frameworks including the 1930 Convention providing a Uniform Law for Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes.
By leveraging these instruments, the market has achieved remarkable efficiency. A7, for instance, processes payments to China in an average of four hours, charging a fee of just 0.3 per cent plus VAT.
A7 TESTS THE SCOPE OF SANCTIONS
A7 became a prominent example in discussions of Russia’s payment-agent market.
The U.S. Treasury designated A7 LLC and A7 Agent LLC in August 2025.
The UK government announced further sanctions against what it described as the A7 “network” in May 2026, alleging that the network was used to circumvent sanctions and channel funds into Russia’s war economy.
But A7’s rapid growth can be viewed as evidence that alternative payment channels can gain scale quickly when conventional routes are constrained. Regulators should not dismiss the payment-agent model itself - which is built entirely on legal instruments.
Furthermore, dismissing these networks as mere “sanctions workarounds” misses the broader strategic point. The payment agent market has become a driving force in the development of alternative international settlement systems. Non-bank payment providers are building settlement infrastructure at the edges of the global system, integrating directly with national payment systems and exploring digital financial assets.
Beyond Russia, a broader, state-backed transformation is taking shape to ensure financial sovereignty in a multipolar world
A SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS
The wider financial industry is moving in a similar direction, although often through very different mechanisms.
Project Nexus is designed to connect domestic instant-payment systems. In 2025, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand established Nexus Global Payments to take the project toward live implementation.
Project mBridge explored cross-border settlement through multiple central bank digital currencies. The Bank for International Settlements says it reached the minimum viable product stage in 2024 before the project was transferred to participating central banks.
These projects have different objectives and governance structures from private payment agents.
In Goossen Rempel’s view, they point toward the same broad development: cross-border finance is no longer being designed around one type of infrastructure.
SWIFT REMAINS CENTRAL
The growth of alternative systems does not eliminate SWIFT.
SWIFT connects more than 11,500 institutions across more than 200 countries and territories.
It is also developing new technology.
In July 2026, Swift said its blockchain ledger was ready for initial use, with 17 banks preparing to pilot tokenized-deposit transactions.
That supports Goossen Rempel’s view that the future is likely to involve coexistence rather than replacement.
Traditional banking networks, domestic instant-payment systems, digital currencies and private settlement providers may increasingly connect to one another.
THE REGULATORY CHALLENGE
That creates opportunities, but also risks. Goossen Rempel says the key issue for business leaders is not whether alternatives will grow, but whether compliance systems can keep pace. More payment routes mean more questions about jurisdiction, sanctions, identity and counterparty exposure.
The financial industry has spent decades building rules around traditional intermediaries.
As new infrastructure develops, those rules will have to operate across a more complex network.
For Goossen Rempel, that may be the most important lesson from Russia.
Alternative financial infrastructure can emerge quickly when businesses need it, but every new route still carries legal, compliance and counterparty obligations.