Cross-border payment infrastructure for banks has been one of the longest-running unfinished projects in financial services. Banks need to make international payments for their customers but maintaining direct correspondent relationships in every market is uneconomic. SWIFT solves part of the problem but introduces its own costs and delays. Earthport was founded in London in 1997 to provide an alternative — a payment network that connected banks directly to local clearing systems across multiple countries, enabling lower-cost, faster cross-border payments without traditional correspondent intermediaries. The company built a global network covering over 90 countries and served major banks and money transfer operators as the wholesale infrastructure underlying their consumer-facing international payment products. Earthport was acquired by Visa in 2019 — a deal that integrated its real-time payment network into Visa Direct, dramatically expanding Visa's cross-border push payment capabilities. The acquisition reflected the strategic value of a global payment network at a moment when real-time international payments were becoming a competitive battleground. For the European fintech ecosystem, Earthport's trajectory — from independent payment innovator to Visa-owned infrastructure — illustrates how the most valuable cross-border payment infrastructure ultimately gets absorbed by the card networks whose own businesses depend increasingly on global reach.