TerraPay Enables Cross-Border Payments to 2.1 Billion Mobile Wallets

TerraPay says financial institutions can now send money to mobile wallets via the Swift system.

The announcement Tuesday (July 23) by the money movement company applies to 2.1 billion mobile wallets worldwide, and is designed to enhance the cross-border payments experience for businesses and consumers.

“Payments initiated by financial institutions over Swift will reach TerraPay’s system with speed and efficiency, and with end-to-end transparency from account to wallet, powered by Swift’s transaction tracking capabilities,” TerraPay said in a news release.

Swift connects more than 11,500 financial institutions in more than 200 countries, while TerraPay’s network facilitates payments between those 2.1 billion wallets and 7.5 billion bank accounts around the world.

The company says the arrangement marks progress toward the G20’s goals for faster, more transparent, and less costly cross-border transactions. The G20 countries have said they want to see 75% of cross-border payments credited to their beneficiaries within an hour by 2027.

TerraPay Co-founder and CEO Ambar Sur said the development also “aligns seamlessly with our vision of fostering a borderless financial ecosystem where moving money everywhere is instant, reliable and compliant, especially to underserved consumers.”

“We estimate that we are reaching 600m unbanked consumers,” Sur added.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with TerraPay Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram about advances in the payments industry this year.

“There are two ways you can increase revenue: either by charging a customer more, or by reducing your costs. And the use of technology in reducing costs is something that is easier to do than trying to charge the customer more,” said Sundaram, who spoke with PYMNTS during a discussion for the series “What’s Next in Payments: The Halftime Report.”

The World Bank’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for a reduction in the cost of cross-border remittances, which is now around 8%.

Sundaram said TerraPay’s efforts align with this goal. Cutting remittance costs can unlock new use cases for cross-border services, thus expanding revenue streams for financial institutions and service providers.

“If you do a $10 transaction today, you’ll probably spend a very significant part of that $10 as fees. And we need to get to a point where that base fee is something that you don’t have to think about, so that you can do low-value transactions at scale — that could change the landscape of cross-border payments and remittances,” he added.

“Apart from that, the way that you generate more revenues is that you create new use cases,” Sundaram said.