The financial services industry is changing rapidly as a result of advances in information technology (IT), telecommunications and the Internet. Technological innovations and increasing customer demand have led to the emergence of new services and new organizational forms for financial services firms. Willingly or unwillingly, banks are being forced to move toward worldwide operation. This enables them to offer services and credit facilities on a global scale, tailored to customers regardless of where they are based. However, variations among national markets present obstacles as well as opportunities to companies attempting to "go global." This paper describes specific problems and solutions for the globalization of banking services, and a case study carried out on payment services for an international bank to develop a new system architecture for cross border payment. The proposed architecture aims to keep a part of the processes local, but transfers the core of the transaction operations to a centralized system with clear services and clear interfaces. The bi-directional translation of formats makes standardized processing possible, while output for the specific contexts can be provided in the original formats. An important property of the architecture is that the rich context has been integrated into the handling of transactions.
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