EXCLUSIVE: "Making The Global Local" - AJ McCray, Bank of America in 'The Paytech Magazine'

Bank of America wants a payment from Miami to Mumbai to feel no different to one made across town, with all the visibility, speed and safety you’d expect from domestic rails

Bank of America’s cross-border payments strategy boils down to one word: local. It’s been the holy grail since 2020, when the G20 nations set their roadmap for faster, cheaper and more transparent international payments. Whether your funds are going round the world or down the road, the experience should be the same.

“With a local payment, our customers, whether consumers or corporates, expect it to get there pretty quickly. They expect to know when it’s arrived and to get a notification. And they expect the amount they sent to be the amount that arrives,” says AJ McCray, Head of Global Payments Product Management at Bank of America. “That’s easier in a local context. When you start sending money to a different country, in a different currency, potentially through more than one bank along the way, it gets more and more difficult. But our vision is to take away those difficulties and constraints as we move payments across countries and currencies, and make it feel like a local experience.”

Speed, certainty and full value. None of those is a radical demand.

But anyone who has experience of a correspondent banking chain knows how rarely all three arrive together. From Q4 2026, Bank of America intends to meet those benchmarks, albeit incrementally, as it rolls out a cross-border real-time payments solution that will enable its corporate, commercial and financial institution clients to send and receive funds instantly through Swift or the bank’s flagship digital platform, CashPro.

The offering will connect to several real-time payment networks, and clients will also be able to receive inbound real-time payments to the United States, where Bank of America serves approximately 70 million consumer and small-business clients.

The first corridors – Mexico, India and the Philippines – will support high-volume, low-value international payments, including international remittances, gig worker payouts, and e-commerce marketplace vendor payments, among others.

Big-ticket treasury transfers will come later, says McCray.

START WITH THE SMALL STUFF

“Whenever we develop a product or a strategy, we always start with a use case: our customers’ problems, especially the unsolved ones,” McCray adds. “We focussed on low-value cross-border payments because that’s what our clients were asking for.

“They told us there was friction and difficulty in moving money cross-border, and they wanted it to feel more like a local experience.”

For those Bank of America customers, seamless cross-border payments isn’t just about making things run smoothly in the back office; it adds value to their brand.

“These are companies sending money to consumers or very small businesses overseas for whom the payment is part of their overall service and client experience. That includes financial institutions and technology, media and telecoms companies,” says McCray “The smoother we can make it, the better their product and service looks to consumers.” That’s not to say corporate treasurers aren’t actively seeking better payment solutions.

“Over the past couple of years there’s been a wave of treasurers updating their processes and technology systems,” says McCray. “Now they’re coming to us saying: we’re ready for more sophisticated applications and banking services. How can you help us optimise our treasury back end?”

GOODBYE, END-OF-DAY REPORT

Two pieces of infrastructure allow the bank to deliver this more sophisticated client experience. One is ISO 20022, the richer messaging standard that Swift has made mandatory for cross-border payments. The other is CashPro, Bank of America’s digita platform for corporate and commercial clients, whose APIs let treasury systems pull data and push instructions directly.

Treasurers have been promised the end of the end-of-day report before, of course, and McCray is careful not to promise to eliminate all the friction at once. But a good deal of it has been addressed.

“We’re moving from an era of end-of-day reports, which you review to work out what to do the next day, to real-time ingestion of information that helps with treasury forecasting and optimising treasury structures,” he says.

Artificial intelligence also has a part to play on the journey, with Bank of America choosing to focus its AI efforts on reconciliation by connecting a customer’s treasury and accounting departments.

“An accounting department and a treasury department might have a pile of invoices, some emails and some e-invoices. We’re using AI to tie together the information on the accounting desk with the payment information on the treasury desk,” explains McCray. “It helps to answer questions like ‘who do I need to pay, and when is the right time to pay them?’ And, on the receivables side, ‘which customers haven’t paid us yet, and how do I manage that? How do I manage what happens before and after the payment, such as invoice and remittance information?’.”

Dull, perhaps. But the reconciliation pile is where the real cost of a payment hides. The bank also recently announced the launch of Payments Insights, a new CashPro capability for corporate and commercial clients, which provides information on payment efficiency, cross-border flows, and working-capital performance across clients’ U.S. accounts.

THE PUSH FOR PROGRESS CONTINUES

The industry’s progress towards its cross-border improvement deadline has faltered. In March this year, the Financial Stability Board warned the G20 that it wouldn’t meet all the benchmarks it had set itself by 2027.

Galvanising the industry for one final push, FSB Chairman and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said: “We are not stopping until the job of making a genuine difference to the user experience of cross-border payments is done.”

McCray says Bank of America isn’t stopping, either. Its launch markets for instant cross-border transactions are countries where real-time payments are no longer viewed as a premium service by consumers or corporates, but rather as a basic requirement.

“Two years from now, we’ll have taken away a lot of the constraints of sending money in a different currency or to a different country, so it feels very much like a local experience,” says McCray. “We’ve shared our strategy with customers, and it’s really hitting the right notes.”