Payments firms expanding internationally frequently plan around an assumption that regulatory regimes will eventually converge, driven by the practical benefits of interoperability. I'd argue the opposite is happening, deliberately: divergence in payments regulation is often a genuine policy choice, not a temporary lag on the way to alignment.
Different jurisdictions have different priorities embedded in their payments regulation — financial stability concerns, competition policy, data sovereignty — and these priorities don't naturally converge just because interoperability would be more convenient for firms operating across borders. Some divergence reflects genuinely different values, not just different timelines.
Firms that plan expansion assuming eventual convergence tend to build compliance infrastructure that's under-specified for the markets they're entering, on the theory that a future harmonisation will simplify things. In practice, I see very little evidence of that harmonisation materialising within planning horizons that matter to an expanding payments firm.
The firms that move fastest and most durably are the ones that build market-specific regulatory strategies from the outset, treating each market's requirements as a permanent feature rather than a temporary inconvenience — and building a coordination function that manages divergence deliberately, rather than a single team trying to apply one template everywhere.
Divergence is inconvenient. It's also, in my experience, the realistic planning assumption, and firms that build for it are the ones who don't get caught rebuilding their compliance infrastructure market by market as the convergence they were waiting for fails to arrive.