You only need to watch the news for the past six months to see it: the post-war liberal consensus is drawing to a close. Recent United States legislation has only accelerated a shift that has been inevitable for some time, the move from a unipolar world to a multipolar one.
To many in the West, it feels as though this change arrived suddenly in 2025, with headlines dominated by tariffs, immigration, and social unrest, all symptoms of the deeper transformation underway. Yet this financial realignment has been unfolding quietly for perhaps two decades.
I have been watching these shifts for much of the past 10 years, most visibly through the rise of BRICS as a parallel trading bloc, but also through the remarkable transformation of Chinese trade under initiatives such as the Belt and Road, which increasingly encourage settlement in renminbi. At the same time, Gulf sovereign funds have begun deploying capital across the Global South in South-South transactions that are now largely decoupled from Western financial systems.
The Bretton Woods System positioned the U.S, and, by extension, the dollar, at the center of global finance. But in 2025, as the U.S. turns inward, countries are acting differently, enabled by tech advances, new alliances, and deeper domestic capital or support from emerging partners.
Sanctions fatigue has set in, and nations are less willing to follow others when it no longer serves their interests.
When the global financial order was designed in the 1940s, the West, primarily the U.S., Canada, and Europe, represented about 35% of the world's population and almost 70% of its GDP. Today, those numbers have fallen to roughly 16% and 36%, a reminder that the institutions of that era now preside over a world fundamentally different from the one that created them.
This quiet reordering has been underway in one form or another since around the turn of the century. Recent policy shifts have accelerated it, lending legitimacy, or at least the perception of it, and quickening the pace.
It is not so much that the world is rejecting the old system; it's much more that it has simply outgrown it.
It is tempting, and common in the public discourse, to view this through a narrow economic lens, but to me, that misses the essence of what is happening. What is unfolding is not solely about interest rates and currency baskets. It's the slow (but getting quicker) transfer of trust from one architecture to another. This change makes for, or at least has the potential to, make the financial world much more participatory rather than permission-led.
The numbers tell the story. Once fully integrated, BRICS+ nations will represent close to 45% of global GDP and encapsulate more than half of the world's population.
In 2024, trade settled outside of USD reached $3.7 trillion, up by an almost unfathomable 60% in the past five years. The UAE and India now transact oil in rupees. Brazil and China settle trade in renminbi. SWIFT is fast losing traction as the cross-border payment rail of choice. Across Africa, countries that have had to route every dollar through Paris or New York are building digital corridors through Nairobi, Kigali, and Accra. Today, 79% of all currency trades have USD in the chain. The world is pivoting, and in the next five years, that number will be halved.
As someone who has lived outside of the West for most of my life, it has always been interesting to me to see and feel the tonal difference between Western and emerging economies. The "can do" attitude of a store owner in Kigali or a young woman in Ho Chi Minh working 12-hour days contrasts sharply with the pessimism faced by a UK entrepreneur or the fact that 10 million working-age Britons are classified as disabled: a staggering 1 in 4 people
Whilst the west sees itself as the centre of all global activity, this shift was never destined to come from Western capitals. It was always going to rise from where energy and ambition are gathering, from people and economies that are no longer willing to have their value priced by someone else's risk. For decades, emerging markets operated within legacy frameworks they didn't design: FX spreads they couldn't control, correspondent banking that misunderstood their exposure, and ratings shaped as much by politics as by credit. Every transaction routed through New York or London added friction, delays, costs, and approvals that impacted lives and GDPs.
The system now needs to unlearn those dependencies and build new thinking, infrastructure, and strategies that serve the Global South of the 2020s, not the Global North of the 1940s.
History moves in cycles. And once again, technology has arrived before institutions have had time to adapt. The story of 2025 is not just a geopolitical rupture but a civilizational rebalancing. The world is redistributing its weight toward a more nuanced centre of gravity.
The legacy model, built for a post-war world of fixed hierarchies, can't contain a planet alive with movement, where capital, code, and culture cross borders faster than treaties can keep up.
There's a quiet beauty to what's emerging. To posit a clunky metaphor, the old order was a pyramid; the new one is a web. In Lagos, a fintech clears cross-border payments in seconds. In São Paulo, a state bank pilots stablecoin settlement. In Cairo, a digital banking infrastructure is being designed from the ground up, not as an imitation of London, but as an expression of Egypt's own rhythm and needs.
Each initiative seems small, but together they form a pattern: a financial architecture native to the realities of the Global South, not an ineffective copy from the assumptions of the Global North. If the late 20th century was defined by scale, the mid-21st century will be defined by distributed equality.
I've spent much of the past decade thinking about and experiencing these changes in real-time, and the last five years building banking architecture for this moment, solutions that address root issues, not neo-colonial iterations. What once felt fringe, believing the Global South needed its own infrastructure, now feels self-evident.
What we will see over the coming decade is this: South: South trade becoming the norm, the rise of non-USD-denominated reserves being held across these countries, and the rise of BRICS+ as the dominant financial bloc supported by a native banking ecosystem that prioritizes these economies, their governments, and most importantly, their people.
For the West, this evolution need not be the threat it is portrayed as. The redistribution of economic agency is not a zero-sum game. It's a broadening of participation, a chance for Western capital and technology to integrate with new centers of dynamism rather than dominate them, in turn creating a virtuous loop to support the rebooting of post-industrial North Atlantic economies as these emerging markets grow in sophistication and scale, global demand diversifies, trade deepens, and innovation expands the frontier for all.
For the South, it is a moment of long-delayed self-determination. By 2030, the Global South will represent nearly 65% of global middle-class consumption and three-quarters of the world's youth population. The regions once described as "emerging" are no longer catching up; they have emerged.
What follows through a negative lens is framed as de-dollarization, but perhaps through a more positive one, it is a re-humanization, finance that reflects the diversity, creativity, and complexity of the cultures and peoples that it serves, rather than one culture imposed on others.
Transitions are rarely tidy. Trust migrates gradually. But the gravitational pull is shifting. Multipolarity is here. Capital, and indeed policy, is beginning to orbit new centers. Regional currencies are finding their footing. Conversations across the Gulf, Africa, LATAM, and Asia are reshaping norms.
To some Western commentators, talk of a "multipolar" world still sounds idealistic. But to most of the planet, it's already here. Legitimacy today more and more stems from functionality, not flags, and systems that do what is necessary, not only what is convenient.
The West is a challenging place at the moment and is perhaps entering a necessary phase of reflection by seeking coherence in this fast-changing world. This is manifesting in polarized politics, riots, marches, and a general social malaise. This is all a response to people feeling unsettled in the uncertain, after 80 years of the West feeling like it had reached the end of history.
The Global South, meanwhile, is entering a phase of expansion, young, ambitious, and impatient for this new self-definition. The aging populations of the West are distrustful of the young population of the Global South, much like an aging family member is dismissive of the musical choices of their teenage grandchild. But much like in a family, together, they form the dual heartbeat of a world in balance.
The post-war order isn't collapsing as much as it's transforming. The currency is still accepted, but the trust behind it is diversifying. Framed more as renewal than revolution, this turning point of growth and equality can be a positive across the world.
I think, though, that the challenge of the Global South is not to take its turn in the queue to replicate the systems the West has relied upon for generations, but to build something better, something more inclusive, something that makes lives better for all in a distributed system.
And in doing so, to learn the lessons of the negatives of an economy that is over-capitalist, and to realize that economic development isn't binary. It isn't peak capitalism at all costs or socialism, like the oversimplified Western narrative seems to have become.
But a system that is equal for all, one that rewards success and hard work for the few but not at the expense of inclusion for the many. Systems and policies that aren't written in marble boardrooms but in collaboration, written in code, yes, but rooted in culture. And, forgive the idealism, reflecting the humanity they serve.
About the Author
Dickie Shearer is the founder of the Tintra Brand, a group of companies and philanthropies built on the belief that finance and politics must reconnect with the human systems it is designed to serve. His work challenges the Western notion of money as abstract and transactional, framing it instead as something rooted in trust, tribe, and shared meaning. Through his work, he is assisting in building the infrastructure for a world where culture, not capital, defines how value flows.
