The standard explanation for friction in global payments is that the infrastructure is old. George Davis, Founder and CEO of Lorum, disagrees. In this Q&A, he argues that the real issue is structural: clearing and settlement still operate inside institutions whose economics are shaped by lending, not by the movement of funds. The industry talks a lot about broken rails and outdated infrastructure. Where do you land on that? There is truth in the argument that parts of the infrastructure are outdated, but that only explains part of the problem. If you build a strategy around half a diagnosis, you usually end up with half a solution. The deeper issue is that clearing and settlement largely sit inside institutions whose primary economics are built around lending. Balance sheet utilisation, credit exposure and net interest margin come first. Settlement comes second. That is not a failure of banks. It is a reflection of what they were built to do. But many of the frictions the industry talks about, such as delays, trapped liquidity, extended settlement windows and pre-funding burdens, are not signs of broken infrastructure. In many cases, they are the predictable outcome of clearing being housed inside institutions that are optimising for something else. So better rails alone will not fix this? Exactly. A lot of the industry still frames the answer too narrowly. Faster messaging, cleaner interfaces and new instruction layers are all useful, but they do not address the incentive structure underneath. A payment can look modern at the front end while still moving through cut-off windows, multiple hand-offs, competing treasury priorities and liquidity constraints behind the scenes. That is why the experience can still feel slow, fragmented or operationally heavy even when parts of the stack appear more advanced. What does this look like in practice for a business moving money internationally? Take a fintech platform settling payroll across five currencies. Each leg of that payment can pass through a correspondent chain where the intermediary bank is also managing its own lending book, treasury position and intraday liquidity. The platform’s settlement is real, but it is competing with the bank’s primary revenue activity for the same liquidity. When volumes spike or cut-off windows tighten, those funds wait. Not because the payment infrastructure has failed, but because the institution’s priorities sit elsewhere.That dynamic repeats across the correspondent banking system. CPMI data confirms that correspondent banking relationships have been in sustained decline, and what remains is increasingly concentrated. Businesses end up dealing with idle funds sitting in nostro buffers, repeated compliance checks at each intermediary and fragmented cash management across multiple banking relationships. If the problem is incentives, what needs to change? If the objective is settlement certainty, stronger liquidity planning and lower operational friction, then clearing cannot remain a by-product of lending economics. It needs to sit within institutions that are designed specifically for movement. That means specialist correspondent institutions with safeguarded client funds, direct local scheme access, appropriate custody structures and a simpler correspondent chain. In that model, the institution’s incentive structure is aligned with moving funds predictably and transparently. What is the core message you want the market to take away? Global payments are not broken. Incentives are. If we want better settlement outcomes, we need to stop treating clearing as a secondary function inside institutions built for something else. This is not about replacing banks. They still play a critical role. But clearing, custody and cash management work best when they sit inside a non-lending model where there is no competing lending book or conflicting balance sheet priority. George DavisFounder and CEOLorumYes