As mobile wallets become more common with billions of users worldwide, a critical gap remains in how these tools operate across borders. While they offer speed and convenience for local transactions, challenges persist in achieving interoperability for international payments. Companies like TerraPay are aiming to address this by building infrastructure that enables seamless cross-border wallet transactions, with banks and merchants as key players. The shift reflects broader demand from consumers and businesses for faster and easier international payments, particularly in underserved regions.
Earlier reports on cross-border digital wallets emphasized the friction in payment networks and the challenges caused by regulations and technical incompatibility. Those analyses suggested that mobile wallets had yet to scale in the international remittance space because of their limited interoperability. The recent update shows advancement in bridging these gaps through TerraPay’s development of a unified infrastructure, demonstrating progress in an area that had long been fragmented. The focus has now moved from identifying obstacles to outlining specific solutions involving banks and merchants.
Why Do Mobile Wallets Struggle with Cross-Border Payments?
Although mobile wallets support real-time payments within countries, their cross-border utility remains limited due to regulatory mismatches and isolated technologies. According to TerraPay’s co-founder and Chief Business Officer Ani Sane, the complexity involves more than just transferring money.
“It’s about compliance, regulations and reconciliation, and settlements and scheme rules,”
Sane explained. These factors make it difficult for wallets to communicate across national boundaries unless supported by a broader framework that handles these various aspects uniformly.
To address these issues, TerraPay is creating a global payment network that integrates with banks via their existing Swift infrastructure. This setup allows financial institutions to offer mobile wallet capabilities without heavy technical modification. Additionally, merchants can join this network to accept wallet payments, expanding the usability of digital wallets in both physical and online retail environments.
“On our platform, more than 50% of our transactions globally were delivered to mobile wallets,”
Sane noted, highlighting the growing role of mobile wallets in small-ticket payments.
Can This Infrastructure Improve Financial Access Globally?
Sane emphasized that mobile wallets hold significant promise for financial inclusion, particularly for populations lacking traditional banking access.
“When you look at the underbanked and underserved segments… it matches up almost 100%”
with mobile wallet usage, he said. This overlap indicates that expanding interoperability could directly benefit those who rely on mobile money for personal and business transactions.
TerraPay tested its interoperability model in environments like Dubai’s duty-free shops, where travelers from Africa used services like M-Pesa and Airtel to make purchases. The results showed that enabling wallet-based payments across regions encouraged more consumer engagement.
“The point is to build that trust between merchants,”
said Sane, emphasizing the need for merchant participation in the growing ecosystem of wallet-based transactions.
Looking ahead, TerraPay aims to establish standardized rulebooks for reconciliation and settlement that mirror domestic transaction models, but on a global scale.
“What we are trying to do is create the infrastructure to create the ‘rule books’ of reconciliation and settlement mechanisms,”
Sane stated. By treating mobile wallets as legitimate financial instruments, the company seeks to support consistent and reliable global payments for consumers and merchants alike.
The development of interoperable digital wallet systems could play a critical role in expanding financial access and simplifying international commerce. For users, especially those in underserved regions, the benefits include faster remittance options and broader payment acceptance. For banks and merchants, integrating with platforms like TerraPay eliminates technical burdens and opens up access to a wider customer base. As real-time payment networks continue to grow, standardized infrastructure may help mobile wallets function more like universally accepted tools rather than isolated, country-specific apps. Financial institutions considering entering this space may benefit from partnerships that provide ready-made infrastructure, reducing costs and compliance challenges.
