What Does the Payment Ecosystem of the Future Look Like

In January, I co-organized a panel on the Future of Payments at Beyond Cash, Code & Monetary Power event, hosted by our New Finance Research Group. The panel brought together Ria Roerink from De Nederlandsche Bank, Tamara Schmidt from the Digital Euro Association, and myself (Aleksandra Asscheman from The Hague University of Applied Sciences) on the legal side.

What made it special was how our three perspectives fit together to reveal the bigger picture.

Private and public money each bring distinct strength and the system needs both.

Private Money + Public Money = A Functioning System

Ria made a point that sounds simple but sometimes gets overlooked: private and public money each have distinct strengths, and the system needs both. Private money (bank deposits, stablecoins, tokenized deposits) drives innovation and usability. Public money (cash, central bank reserves, CBDCs) provides stability and trust.

The problem? The balance is shifting. Cash use is declining. Public money is becoming less visible in the digital economy. That's why central banks are exploring CBDCs. Not to replace private money, but to preserve the anchor that keeps the system grounded.

Stablecoins: Faster, But Not Fixed

Tamara walked us through what stablecoins actually solve and what they don't.

Yes, they're faster. Yes, they enable 24/7 settlement. Yes, they reduce intermediaries. The diagram she showed comparing correspondent banking networks to blockchain-based stablecoin payments made the efficiency gains obvious.

But stablecoins don't fix the underlying structural problems. Liquidity remains fragmented across different issuers and blockchains. Access is still gated: you need controlled on-ramps and off-ramps to move between traditional finance and crypto rails. Compliance complexity doesn't disappear; it just shifts from banks to issuers and platforms. And currency concentration persists: 99% of stablecoins are pegged to USD, reinforcing existing monetary hierarchies rather than diversifying them.

Stablecoins solve the speed problem. They don't solve the system problem. The real challenge? Interoperability. How do different forms of money - public, private, tokenized, traditional - actually work together safely? That's the missing layer.

The Legal Bottleneck

This is where I came in, and it's what our Open Payments Innovation Lab is built around: technology is moving faster than law, and that gap is the real constraint.

Cross-border payments now operate as global networks, but regulation is still organized territorially. That mismatch creates structural friction everywhere. AML regimes differ across jurisdictions. Sanctions frameworks are not aligned. Licensing requirements differ in every market. Capital controls slow payments through mandatory verification and documentation requirements that vary by country.

I showed the audience a specific example that illustrates the structural tension. The EU Instant Payments Regulation requires euro payments to settle within 10 seconds. At the same time, EU institutions remain exposed to US sanctions enforced by OFAC.

So what do you do? Screen transactions during execution and risk breaching EU regulation because you're too slow. Don't screen and risk OFAC enforcement and loss of USD access. This isn't a technical problem. It's structural legal misalignment. And it's not going away unless we fundamentally rethink how regulation is coordinated across borders.

What This Means for Our Students

This is exactly why we built the Open Payments Innovation Lab. We're not just teaching ILP or stablecoins or regulations in isolation. We're training students to see the system: to understand how technology, law, and finance interact, and where the friction points are.

Our students learn to ask:

• How does technical architecture shape what's legally possible?

• How do regulatory constraints influence business models?

• How do you design a payment solution that works across conflicting jurisdictions?

• Where is accountability in automated systems?
  

These aren't academic questions. They're what fintech companies, regulators, and policymakers are struggling with right now.

And not enough people can answer them.