We tend to think of money as value - the cash in our wallet, the balance displayed on a banking app. But money is both instrument and infrastructure: it’s not only value, in other words, but the rail that moves it from place to place.
The form money takes carries symbolic weight, but the real power lies in who manages it, and in who decides when and where it can flow.
In a tumultuous world, control of financial infrastructure is a powerful geopolitical weapon.
Countries freeze assets to bend others to their will. They control access to payments systems. They extend debt or credit with strings attached, reshaping domestic policies. And they wield sanctions to disconnect their adversaries from the global grid.
The League of Nations weaponised finance to suppress Mussolini’s fascist party in the 1930s. Banks cut off apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the US froze Russian assets and blocked Russian access to the Swift payment system. On September 16th, the US targeted oil buyers and threatened punishments for countries that transact via Russia’s SPFS payments system (the Russian alternative to Swift.)
The Swift system was established in 1973 as a global payments messaging standard. It was headquartered in Brussels (rather than London or New York) to underscore its neutrality, but the dollar’s role as a reserve currency means it has always been embroiled in American financial power. (In 2006 it was revealed the US government had secretly accessed Swift data in the wake of 9/11.)
In 2012, under pressure from the US and the EU, Swift unplugged Iranian banks from the global payments network, forcing the country into nuclear negotiations. What was couched as a neutral infrastructure that sends messages, not money, became overtly political.
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Payments infrastructure is a geopolitical tool but it’s also a site of moral and cultural control. Private companies, often nudged by regulators, act as de facto arbiters of who can and can’t participate in the economy.
When WikiLeaks published US diplomatic cables in 2010, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal abruptly cut off donations.
More recently, Black Lives Matter groups and Palestinian solidarity organisations have had their accounts suspended by PayPal or banks, citing “compliance risk”.
Sex workers in the United States already know how morality gets written into money. They are routinely frozen out of many legal forms of online sex work and cut off from their accounts.
For individuals and communities, the quiet switch that severs someone from economic life can be as devastating as losing access to water or electricity - and the same holds true on an international scale.
In geopolitics, economic sanctions weaponise the infrastructure of payments.
The United States runs the rails of global finance. While Swift is technically a neutral entity, America’s regulatory heft and the central role of New York banks in clearing transactions give the US extraordinary power to decide who gets to stay on the network, and who is pushed off.
Money is infrastructure. Infrastructure is power. That power is immense. But it’s also increasingly contested.
We are standing on the verge of what David Birch has called a “currency cold war”, fought in payments protocols and financial networks.
In particular, there is pushback to the model where one global superpower has control of the rails of global payment. Russia already has 177 banks across 24 countries on its SPFS system.
China is also doubling down on payment alternatives. CIPPS (cross-border interbank payments system) was developed to clear and settle transactions in its currency and to eventually decouple from the Swift network.
In the broader global landscape, countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India are also looking to invest in their own non-western payments rails. In a recent talk at the Eurofi Seminar 2025 in Brussels, Piero Cipolone of the ECB warned of geopolitical fragmentation.
“As of today, over 100 jurisdictions worldwide have implemented their own fast payment systems,” he warned. “Without global co-ordination, these initiatives risk creating new silos and fragmenting the international monetary system.”
The ECB economist argued that the EU must take the lead in acting as a bridge for payment systems and ensuring international standards, so that Europe doesn’t get squeezed between US dominance and rival blocs.
Infrastructure can feel opaque and difficult to grasp, but for Ireland, these questions aren’t abstract. We sit at the intersection of switches and networks, where cables come to land and infrastructural powers flex their weight. On the one hand, as part of the euro area, our payments network is tied into Europe’s systems.
On the other, Ireland is an important base for many of the biggest American payments and tech firms, from PayPal to Stripe and Apple. The rails we rely on every day to tap in-store or send money online often run through Dublin, but ultimately connect back to New York or California. That leaves us in a delicate position: anchored by Europe, but dependent on US rails.
If global finance really does splinter into rival blocs, those bridges could become the front lines, caught between our political ties to the EU and our infrastructural ties to the United States.
This tension raises the question of who really governs access to where money flows: elected policymakers in Europe, or the private American platforms that process so much of our financial traffic from Dublin?
