How Global Trade Survives a Changing Rulebook

An interview with David Henig by Sean Murphy

Some of the most consequential changes happening in cross-border payments have nothing to do with legislation, a stablecoin launch, or new corridors going live. The broader issue is the regulatory baseline fragmenting under everyone's feet. David Henig, a director at the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, has spent the past few years watching that drift up close. His conclusion is the many global companies may find hard to hear: the world is not coming back together, and the companies that succeed over the next decade will be those that build for a fragmented reality rather than wait for it to reverse.

The story that emerging markets are decoupling from the West, that supply chains are dismantling, that globalisation is in retreat, is mostly noise. The underlying flows of goods and capital are still there.

What has changed is not the volume of activity but the architecture beneath it. For thirty years, central banks, clearing houses, regulators and trade negotiators built a steadily converging set of rules that made the global movement of money look almost frictionless. Visa and Mastercard scaled globally not because their technology was uniquely brilliant but because the plumbing they sat on top of was largely the same plumbing everywhere. That convergence has stopped and some places it is going into reverse.

For payments this is the central fact of the decade. A stablecoin issued under MiCA in Frankfurt is not the same instrument as one issued under the GENIUS Act in New York. The forthcoming UK regime will be a third variant. Each will have its own reserve rules, its own equivalence provisions, its own scrutiny of who issues, who custodies, who redeems. Yet the proportion of actual cross-border trade settled in stablecoins remains marginal, and Henig is sceptical that this is a temporary gap. In a low-trust political environment, each major economic bloc will pursue its own answer rather than converge on someone else's. A treasurer in São Paulo will not accept a dollar stablecoin on the basis of a US regulator's blessing alone, and a CFO in Munich is unlikely to route corporate flows through rails her own central bank has not endorsed.

The tariff debate, which dominates so much financial commentary, is in Henig's view a useful illustration of the wider point. Tariffs make for compelling headlines and powerful political theatre, but the actual impact on global trade volumes has been more contained than the rhetoric suggests. The US regime under the current administration has carved out enough exemptions, and triggered enough rerouting, that the practical effect on the total volume of world trade is real but smaller than the noise around it implies. The instability is not in the volume of trade but in the predictability of the rules governing it. For a company whose revenue depends on cross-border transaction flows, the question is not whether goods will move. It is whether the regulatory ground will stand still long enough to underwrite a five-year product roadmap.

The third piece of Henig's diagnosis is the one Brussels insiders understand and outsiders consistently underestimate. There is a great deal of fintech innovation happening at the edges of the European Union. The Baltics, the Nordics, Ireland, and parts of Central Europe have built ecosystems that punch far above their size. In theory, those frontier markets should be able to push their best ideas upward and have them adopted at European level. In practice, the larger member states and the larger companies have more time with the Commission, more lobbying capacity, and more ability to frame the debate.

Brussels does eventually move, but it moves on its own timetable, and that timetable rarely matches the velocity of the technology. 

There are always chances for progress, Henig is careful to say, because institutions are in listening mode in different ways throughout the cycle. The real openings come with elections and a new Commission, and the next one forms in 2029. That is the moment the fintech sector should be organising towards, because whoever leads the next Commission will need a fresh framework for competitiveness and international coordination. If the industry organises itself in the intervening years, there is a window. If it does not, the centre will continue to set the pace and the periphery will continue to wait.

What this means in practice, Henig suggests, is unglamorous. Build for a world in which global operations are possible but constrained by several rulesets operating in parallel. Assume that the fragmentation is the design, not a temporary fault. Watch the bilateral trade agreements the EU has signed with Brazil, India, and Australia, because those documents are where the next generation of financial services rules will be written, even if they look thin today. Do not, above all, wait for a return to the seamless world of a decade ago. It is not coming back anytime soon.