Ran Grushkowsky is CEO of MassPay, a global payout orchestration platform specializing in instant, real-time payouts worldwide.
A treasury lead in Singapore pays a seller in Jakarta for goods already shipped. Neither has any use for U.S. dollars. The payment becomes dollars anyway, then becomes rupiah. Two conversions, two spreads.
Nobody asked for a third currency, but they got one because of a problem we solved long ago and never revisited.
You have apples. I have bananas. We both want oranges. Nothing happens, because barter needs two people to want exactly what the other is holding. Money fixed that by putting something in the middle that everyone accepts. The middleman was the invention.
It worked so well we did it again, one level up. When currencies multiplied, money needed a middleman of its own.
The Currency In The Middle
The dollar took that job, and its hold on it is close to absolute.
The Bank for International Settlements surveys the foreign exchange market every three years. Its April 2025 edition found the dollar on one side of 89.2% of all trades, up from 88.4% in 2022, out of $9.6 trillion changing hands every day.
The share is striking. The structure underneath is more so: The BIS reports that the ten most traded currency pairs all involve the dollar, “reflecting its status as the world’s vehicle currency.” Not most of the top ten. All of it.
Nobody sat down and decided this. The dollar became the currency in the middle for the same reason money did: It was the thing everyone accepted, and building a direct market for every pair was never realistic.
That was sound engineering, but it is also now, in a growing number of corridors, unnecessary.
Every Field That Went Global Hit This Wall
Language solved the same problem the same way, and gave it a name.
The European Union has 24 official languages, which is 552 possible translation directions. Nobody can staff for 552 combination. Its Economic and Social Committee cuts them to 134 using three bridge languages: English, French and German. A document going from Maltese to Irish passes through English on the way.
Translators call this a pivot language: You route through the middle when the direct route was never built. Economics calls the same practice a vehicle currency, which is the phrase the BIS used in that same report.
In short, two fields found the same workaround for the same reason.
Translation Stopped Needing The Middle
Then one of those two fields stopped.
In October 2020, Facebook AI, now Meta, released M2M-100. The company called it the first model to translate between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English data, trained across 2,200 language directions, ten times more than the English-centered models before it.
On non-English pairs, precisely the ones that had always been forced through English, it gained more than 10 points on BLEU, the standard measure of translation quality. The reason the researchers gave for building it is the part worth sitting with: They trained directly on Chinese-to-French data “to better preserve meaning.”
Something was being destroyed in the middle hop. Not in a poetic sense. Measurably. And the moment enough direct data existed, the pivot stopped being an efficiency and became a tax.
Payments Is Where Translation Was In 2020
The direct pairs are being built right now, and most people paying across borders have not noticed.
More than 100 jurisdictions now run a domestic fast payment system. Nexus Global Payments, the company five central banks spun out of the BIS Innovation Hub last year, is joining them into a single hub instead of bilateral links: India’s UPI, Malaysia’s DuitNow, the Philippines’ InstaPay, Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay. Bank Indonesia joined as a sixth member in February. Go live is targeted for 2027, with payments reaching recipients inside 60 seconds in most cases. In Africa, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) now connects 28 countries and more than 190 commercial banks and fintechs.
And on August 31, Bank Indonesia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore operationalized a framework appointing twelve banks, nine Indonesian and three Singaporean, as cross-currency dealers for trade and investment flows, aimed at promoting direct quotation between the rupiah and the Singapore dollar. The Singapore-to-Jakarta payment now has a road that does not pass through New York.
None of this is a revolution. It is a build-out, corridor by corridor. But the routing logic in most payment stacks was written when the dollar leg was the only option, and few have gone back to check whether that still holds for their corridors.
What Fluency Asks Of A Platform
Three things, none of them dramatic:
• Fund in the currencies you operate in. If revenue arrives in Singapore dollars and obligations are in rupiah, converting everything to dollars in between is a habit, not a requirement.
• Convert once where a direct pair exists, and know which ones do. This changes quarter to quarter now. A corridor that needed the dollar leg last year may not this year, and nothing in a payment stack announces when that flips. Somebody has to look.
• Ask your provider which corridors still route through a third currency, and why. There are good answers. Thin pairs genuinely still need the dollar, and pretending otherwise costs more than admitting it. But “that is how we have always routed it” is not one of them.
At MassPay, we expanded to 39 local funding currencies because customers kept asking to hold money in the currency they earn in and pay out of it directly. What surprised me was how often the direct path already existed, and nobody used it.
The Bottom Line
Money was invented so that nobody would need a double coincidence of wants. Then money acquired a middleman of its own, for the same good reason, and we stopped noticing it was there.
That reason is expiring, one corridor at a time. The goal was never for everyone to speak dollars, but for nobody to have to.
The seller in Jakarta does not need her payment to pass through a language nobody in the transaction speaks. She needs it to arrive in rupiah.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
