The safe and secure movement of money is the lifeblood of global trade and community resilience, yet there are still barriers. The world’s “forgotten financial corridors” remain underserved, limiting efficiency and growth. By working together to design and implement practical solutions, we can strengthen these corridors, drive economic growth and prosperity, and ensure that international commerce thrives across every continent.
Crown Agents Bank (CAB), a UK licensed bank with origins dating back to 1833, has built its reputation serving its clients with reliability and trust. At its heart it is a transactional banking service provider, regulated in the UK with operations globally. It specialises in providing a complete suite of solutions, from enhanced payments and FX to trade finance and deposits. All tailored for organisations operating in emerging markets.
Claire Gates is the Global Head of Payments and Solutions at CAB and is leading the charge to build inclusive scalable financial pathways where traditional banking systems hesitate or disengage. These corridors connect emerging markets commerce and enable vital daily operations: from enabling business to trade seamlessly across borders to humanitarian organizations delivering emergency aid.
By opening these pathways, we are not only addressing immediate challenges but also laying the foundation for sustainable growth, stronger global partnerships, and a more connected financial future. Together, we can transform overlooked corridors into thriving channels of opportunity and impact.
The challenge is not a lack of demand, but the complexity of these markets. Regulations change overnight, legacy systems fail to adapt, and currency flows get trapped in bureaucratic tangles. While major banks focus on predictable profits in established markets, entire regions are locked out of the global financial ecosystem. Claire argues that meaningful innovation happens here, not in boardrooms debating buzzwords, but in hard-to-reach places where real solutions move money for real purposes.
Claire leads with a conviction rooted in over twenty-five years in payments: technology means nothing without trust, products fail without deep market understanding, and the customer’s actual problem must always define the solution.
The Mission That Doesn’t Shift
Claire’s leadership mission remains anchored in a simple, profound goal: building the foundation that enables exceptional products to address specific needs within marketplaces. This focus, “addressing a specific need,” is her primary filter for evaluating every decision, partnership, and product design.
She builds her work on a genuine, earned understanding of what customers, partners, and countries actually need to trade, grow, and prosper, not what banks assume they need. The value delivered must be real, and the benefit must be mutual, ensuring the product adds tangible value while building a sustainable business.
What captivates her about CAB’s mission is the requirement to forge genuine connections in operating countries. This is practical, grounded, and deeply human work. She rejects the “dangerous comfort of lift-and-shift thinking”, the assumption that a successful solution in New York will automatically thrive in Nairobi or Dhaka. Instead, she insists on understanding ground-level needs and technologies, recognizing that every market carries subtle dynamics. Interestingly, countries unburdened by legacy technology often move faster, adopting cutting-edge infrastructure that places them at innovation’s forefront. This reality demands that her team continuously evolve propositions, as static thinking simply does not survive in these markets.
Where Legacy Meets Agility
The tension between fintech agility and legacy banking discipline is a central theme in Claire’s work. Her career has spanned both worlds, allowing her to appreciate the strengths of each.
Large financial institutions provide the vital stability: robust regulation, governance frameworks, compliance protocols, and established risk management systems. While early fintechs initially lacked these elements, the landscape has matured, and many now face the identical requirements from regulators and central banks that traditional institutions have always managed; standards are converging.
However, the enduring characteristic of fintechs is their ability to dynamically build, trial, test, and refine. They iterate and experiment, failing fast and adjusting faster. Larger organizations, burdened by legacy infrastructure and layered governance, struggle to match this nimble behaviour, operating like massive cargo ships trying to match speedboats for manoeuvrability.
Claire believes value crystallizes in collaboration- partnerships, acquisitions, and joint market entry. Fintechs help banks accelerate innovation, and banks create stability and opportunity for fintechs. Together, they amplify impact and drive financial inclusion globally. The future belongs to organizations that can successfully blend both strengths: fintech agility with banking stability.
Differentiation When Everything Commoditizes
As payments infrastructure increasingly commoditizes, APIs standardize, platforms proliferate, and speed becomes table stakes, Claire knows differentiation can’t come from technology alone. Instead, she drives it through something harder to replicate: a culture of singular client focus merged with the highest service standards.
CAB’s purpose centers on delivering prosperity to the markets it serves. This requires strategically positioning people where partners are. For example, New York anchors their Americas operations to ease business into Latin American corridors. While core competencies are centralized for scale, the team engages locally in markets, ensuring every individual is an expert in their respective field.
This singular focus must remain commercially viable; it’s a sustainable business, not a charity. Operating as an FCA/PRA-regulated UK bank while providing relevant products that meet local regulatory requirements demands proximity to market dynamics, including competition, geopolitical shifts, and macroeconomic trends. This closeness enables effective optimization, smart productization, and genuinely seamless delivery.
Competition as Collaboration Canvas
Claire champions bank-fintech collaboration, even when internal teams instinctively view fintechs as threats. She believes competition is essential for any industry, requiring vigilance to maintain an edge and prevent “dangerous vacuum thinking”.
For CAB, she predominantly examines the landscape through a collaborative lens. The customer sits at the center of every decision: How can they super-serve customers? Is it through their own offer, partnering with others, or exploring acquisitions? She cultivates a healthy tension by examining competitors’ products, integration strategies, scalability, and operational resilience- factors imperative for clients.
She requires her teams, product, sales, marketing, to maintain a rigorous, in-depth outside-in view on customers, markets, and the competitive environment; surface knowledge is insufficient. CAB continuously seeks partnership opportunities globally, mapping to its Global South expertise. The goal is to create customer experiences that are additive, enhancing security, or providing frictionless payment choices. The era of trying to build everything internally has passed; today’s product expectations require solutions to operate to set standards. Looking to partnerships is how they move forward faster, improve, exceed expectations, and delight customers.
Alignment Through Intentional Ritual
Managing cross-functional teams (technology, operations, and client success) requires intentional leadership rituals to keep everyone aligned with the payments strategy. Claire learned that alignment doesn’t happen accidentally. While strategy is important, shared accountability truly drives engagement and collaboration. Giving people input into strategy development and ensuring everyone across the organization knows their role proves crucial because strategy means nothing without execution.
Operational plans must address the strategy, constantly evolve, and map precisely to business plans. This requires mapping dependencies to extended teams across the entire organization. Success depends on ensuring experts in all functions pull in the same direction with aligned objectives.
To accomplish this, time is invested in creating operational or working group teams, ensuring people understand their roles, how they contribute, and the necessary timelines. They run short weekly cross-functional standups to ensure technology, operations, and client success are all informed. Once monthly, they hold deeper strategy sessions examining roadmaps, regulatory changes, and ensuring they are solving for the right priorities.
A key ritual is bringing the client’s voice into the room. Whether through panels or curated feedback, this reminds everyone that their work directly impacts businesses and communities relying on cross-border flows. Claire sees it as building a championship sports team: when everyone knows their position and the play, they work better collectively, and focus on winning together.
The Question Future Leaders Need
Claire states, “If I could leave the next generation of payments leaders with one guiding question, it would be: “Whose problem are we really solving, and are we solving it in a way that builds trust?””.
In emerging markets, cross-border payments are not abstract concepts about speed or cost; they are about enabling international trade, helping development agencies send money to crises, and delivering financial access to the excluded. If leaders fail to start by asking whose problem they are solving, they risk building products that look brilliant on paper but ignore realities on the ground. The disconnect between assumption and reality destroys more products than technical limitations ever will.
The second part, trust, is absolutely critical. Payments are invisible until they fail. In markets with rapidly shifting infrastructure and regulation, clients need confidence that the solution is reliable, compliant, and genuinely designed for their needs. Before any new product launch, future leaders must pause and ask: Is this solving a real pain point for the customer, and will they trust us to deliver it consistently? A clear “yes” means they’re building something that will last.
Preparing for Tomorrow’s Seismic Shifts
Looking ahead, Claire believes the greatest disruption is the move toward instant global settlement. This will be enabled by greater technology shifts already advanced, such as tokenization, and the eventual mainstream adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins. In emerging markets, the friction in cross-border flows, delays, and high costs, complexity remains the biggest barrier to inclusion.
Achieving true instant settlement fundamentally changes the game. Liquidity management will look completely different, compliance frameworks need radical adaptation, and client expectations will shift dramatically. As a leader, this means preparing her team not just to adopt new technologies, but to think differently about risk, regulation, and client experience.
They are actively building understanding around blockchain and tokenization across all functions- not just technology, but operations and client success. She wants every leader to understand how these tools will reshape their workflows and responsibilities. Scenario planning exercises are used to anticipate what their operating model would look like if CBDCs become interoperable across borders, or how client onboarding changes if settlement is instantaneous.
Most importantly, she encourages a mindset shift. Emerging technologies aren’t just technical upgrades; they redefine trust in payments. Part of her role is ensuring the leadership team is comfortable leading through ambiguity, building partnerships with regulators, and staying close to the client voice as these disruptions unfold. The best preparation blends technical readiness with cultural readiness, because technology only matters if it’s trusted and actively used.
Building Pathways That Matter
Claire represents the kind of leadership the payments industry urgently needs. She doesn’t chase trends or prioritize novelty over substance, nor does she assume solutions built for Frankfurt will work in Accra or Hanoi. Instead, she asks better questions, listens more carefully, and builds with intention and integrity.
Her numerous recognitions reflect not just achievements but an approach combining technical expertise with genuine empathy for the customers and markets she serves.
In an industry where failure can mean missed medical supplies, delayed humanitarian aid, or businesses unable to pay suppliers or employee’s salaries, the work Claire leads is not abstract theory. It is a tangible impact and essential infrastructure. It is executed with a rigour that ensures when money needs to move, it moves- reliably, transparently, and with earned trust.
This is the kind of leadership that doesn’t just reimagine banking; it rebuilds it from the ground up, one corridor, one customer, one solution at a time. In those forgotten corridors where traditional banking hesitates, Claire is architecting the pathways that connect prosperity to the people who need it most.
