For non-US banks, the conversation has shifted. The central question today is no longer whether international trade and cross-border commerce will continue to grow—albeit perhaps more unevenly and with some fits and starts along the way—but rather how to approach the US market to participate in that growth. Regulatory costs, supervisory complexity and geopolitical uncertainty have made the United States a more difficult—and at times less welcoming—environment for non-US institutions. Even with some softening of regulatory costs under President Donald Trump’s administration, the US is likely to remain one of the more demanding regulatory environments worldwide.
However, while difficulties exist in trading with the US—particularly at the moment—these difficulties should not be confused with decline. As global trade evolves, supply chains digitize, and new payment and financing tools emerge, the US continues to sit at the crossroads of capital, innovation and trust. The real question facing global banks is not whether to step back from the US but how to operate effectively within an increasingly complex environment.
That question turns first on the trajectory of global trade itself.
It may well be that international trade and commerce cool over the next several years, whether due to tariffs or broader geopolitical disruptions. However, personal and institutional connectivity, reinforced by technology and evolving resource needs, makes it unlikely that global trade will diminish meaningfully over the short term and more likely that it will expand over the long term. This does not mean trading patterns won’t change. They have and they will.
History supports this view. Since World War II, international commerce has shown remarkable resilience, with even the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)—despite a deep downturn and a slow recovery—failing to derail this growth permanently. Between 2011 and 2019, global trade grew at an average annual rate of roughly 3.0 percent, dropping only modestly to a projected 2.7 percent for the 2023–26 period. In 2025, global trade reached a historic milestone of approximately $35 trillion.
This growth has increasingly been driven not only by merchandise and physical goods but also by services and technology. Digitally delivered services—such as software, streaming and remote professional services—more than doubled between 2010 and 2022. While merchandise trade remains the largest component, services trade has grown at nearly 9 percent annually in recent years, significantly outpacing the growth of physical goods. In 2025, trade in artificial intelligence (AI)-related goods, including semiconductors, servers, and information and communications technology (ICT) equipment, accounted for roughly 15 percent of all global trade and contributed nearly half of the total growth in trade value that year.
To be sure, some believe the era of “unbounded globalization” has been replaced by a more strategic and fragmented model. Over the long term, it will be hard to say whether global trade will return to the uniform growth of previous decades. Even so, regional growth continues to expand at a meaningful scale and could well be a driving force for international trade over the next several years. For example, developing economies now account for more than 40 percent of global merchandise trade. Notably, South-South trade (trade between developing nations) has become a central pillar of the global economy, reaching roughly 54 percent of all developing-country exports by 2024.
Financial innovation has aided and abetted the growth in international trade. However, both governmental and institutional considerations have resulted in some restraint on modernization and the fluidity of international finance. On the governmental side, strengthened anti-money-laundering (AML) requirements and post-2007 regulatory frameworks such as Dodd-Frank (Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and Basel III have increased capital, compliance and operational costs, particularly affecting small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in developing markets. The trade-finance gap is now estimated at roughly $2.5 trillion. Within the private sector, financial institutions’ desire to hold on to float has also been a drag on progress.
Notwithstanding these constraints, a number of positive developments in international finance have helped support trade by providing the liquidity and risk mitigation that companies require to deal with unknown partners across borders. Since 2000, for example, the proliferation of supply-chain finance has allowed large buyers to use their credit ratings to help smaller suppliers secure early payments, unlocking trillions of dollars in working capital. More importantly, the modernization of trade finance over the last 25 years has shifted from simply “putting paper online” to far more automated and digital tools. For example, the electronic bill of lading has finally achieved broad adoption. Transactions that once required seven to ten days of physical courier services can now be settled in under 24 hours via secure digital registries.
Other advances have followed. Some banks now use artificial intelligence to screen the more than 100 pages of documentation typically required for a single letter of credit (LC), reducing processing times by 60-70 percent and drastically cutting down on fraud. At the same time, non-bank lenders increasingly rely on alternative data—such as shipping logs and utility bills—rather than balance sheets alone to extend credit to small and medium-sized enterprises. Instead of separate systems for shipping, insurance and banking, modern platforms use application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect all parties through a single real-time data stream.
These innovations have played an important role in accelerating and growing international trade. The most consequential shift now emerging, however, lies in the modernization of the payment infrastructure itself, particularly through the use of digital currencies, including stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
Importantly, while much of the early innovation and volume in digital currencies has occurred outside the United States, the tools most relevant to regulated financial institutions are increasingly converging around the US system. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits rely overwhelmingly on US dollars, US collateral and US regulatory frameworks to function at scale, anchoring new payment rails to the same foundations that have long supported global trade finance. While stablecoins and tokenized deposits differ in structure (some operate on public blockchains, others are issued by regulated banks on private networks)—to pun for a moment—they are in many ways two sides of the same “coin”. Both are designed to deliver speed and programmability while maintaining stability through explicit collateral backing and operating within frameworks that provide legal certainty and regulatory oversight. That combination is difficult to replicate outside the United States.
This dynamic matters for where financial intermediation increasingly occurs. As payment rails and compliance frameworks modernize in parallel, scale and standard-setting tend to follow the deepest and most trusted markets. In practice, this means that even institutions headquartered elsewhere often find themselves aligning their systems, capital and partnerships around US-based infrastructure to serve global clients efficiently. Over time, those choices shape investment decisions, operating footprints and the allocation of balance-sheet capacity.
At this point, the adoption of these tools is no longer speculative. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits are developing within the US regulatory perimeter, supported by US-dollar infrastructure, deep capital markets and supervisory oversight. As cross-border payments modernize, the center of gravity for these activities is not shifting away from the United States but, in many cases, becoming more firmly anchored to it. The remaining uncertainty is less about viability than timing: How quickly will they become the dominant form of payment nationally and internationally?
Underpinning this entire evolution is an even more fundamental reality: the enduring dominance of the US dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency. Despite periodic predictions of “de-dollarization”, the greenback remains the bedrock of global finance, anchoring liquidity and cross-border activity at scale.
For non-US banks, the implication is clear. Participation in global trade increasingly requires engagement with the systems, standards and financial infrastructure that are evolving around these tools. While operating in the US has unquestionably become more complex, the strategic cost of disengagement may be higher still. The trajectory of trade, payments and innovation suggests that meaningful participation in global markets will remain closely linked to the US ecosystem—its currency, institutions and regulatory framework.
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