Digital Wallets Poised to Become the SMS of Global Money Movement

Mobile wallets are well-designed for instant gratification — as that ubiquitous instrument, the mobile phone, makes it easier than ever to pay merchants or to complete a P2P transaction with speed, especially as real-time networks go live across the globe.

But a smooth path between senders and receivers (despite both wielding mobile wallets) across borders is lacking, as there’s no widespread interoperability between networks. Recent research in collaboration between TerraPay and PYMNTS Intelligence indicates that 42% of consumers prefer to send cross-border payments via digital wallets — leaving a staggering greenfield opportunity of 58% of individuals. The opportunity stretches across 5.2 billion mobile wallet users and trillions of transactions, as people travel, conduct cross-border commerce and send remittances.

For TerraPay, which started a decade ago (with the working name “interoperable exchange”), the initial starting point in simplifying global money movement took its cue from the telecoms, and the fact that SMS messages could cross competing carriers’ networks — one of the earliest forms of interoperability.

But as Ani Sane, co-founder and chief business officer at TerraPay, told Karen Webster in a recent interview, moving money is about more than just the transaction: “It’s about compliance, regulations and reconciliation, and settlements and scheme rules.” Building a network to handle those complexities is no easy task, given the fact that as Sane said, digital wallets operate in silos, on the regulatory and technological sides of the equation, as they’re designed to work in a particular country. 

TerraPay has been building a network to that allows banks to leverage their existing Swift relationships and send payments to be integrated into TerraPay’s platform to enable payments between digital wallets. The banks, he said, do not have to conduct any technical heavy lifting for that connectivity or to bring digital wallet options to end customers. Additionally, TerraPay connects to merchants, enabling them to accept digital wallet payments — and thus the thousands of wallets operating across the globe mimic the almost universal acceptance of physical cards at physical and digital points of sale.

“On our platform,” in 2024, “more than 50% of our transactions globally were delivered to mobile wallets … they were small-value ticket sizes,” he said, “but sending money to a wallet instantly is a great opportunity for banks to serve those small-value customers and businesses.”

There’s already broad familiarity with global fund flows, as the data shows 70% of consumers use cross-border transactions to pay and receive remittances and 77% of businesses generally engage in business-to-business cross-border transactions with suppliers.

That global reach, Sane said, will broaden financial inclusion. As he told Webster, “When you look at the underbanked and underserved segments” of the world, “and you look at mobile wallets [held] by that segment, it matches up almost 100%.”

COVID, especially, has made us all global citizens, and as such, we want to be able to transact globally. Sane recounted how TerraPay’s initial tests with merchants at duty-free shops at the Dubai airport revealed that offering M-Pesa, Airtel or other payment options through the interoperability network made African travelers landing there enthusiastic consumers.

“The point is to build that trust between merchants,” he said, “without having to think about which [payment] schemes have done the best. It’s a long journey … and we’ll need more efforts from the merchant side of this.”

Looking ahead, Sane said, “What we are trying to do is create the infrastructure to create the ‘rule books’ of reconciliation and settlement mechanisms … for both the wallets and the merchants and to do cross-border what they do domestically. … It’s an amazing tool to be able to use the mobile wallets as financial instruments.”

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