Money movement company TerraPay has formed a 'Wallet Interoperability Council' with five leading payment operators to facilitate interconnection in cross-border transactions.
Founding members of the council include Airtel, bKash, MPESA, Nequi, and Sama Money who together serve millions of wallet users spanning regions such as Bangladesh, Colombia, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.
The council aims to facilitate merchant payments, international remittances, and other use cases in cross-border transactions by interconnecting their diverse primarily domestic platforms.
Esther Masese Waititu, chief financial services officer at Safaricom, says: “This initiative is a significant and timely development. This collaborative effort with TerraPay, is pioneering interoperability for global wallet payments and will accelerate our efforts in driving more value for our users for international money movement.”
As part of the initiative, TerraPay will provide both the technology infrastructure and handling clearing and settlement processes for wallet transactions.
Ian Ferrao CEO Airtel Money says: "Until now the only option to enable our users to use their wallet internationally was to secure bilateral agreements, but we can’t sign 100s of them efficiently, and that’s where this alliance brings value to all the participants.”
Multiple studies show that by 2028, there will be more than 7 billion wallets processing around $16 trillion in volume. Cross-border capability is seen as a key plank in ramping up volume and extending the utility of wallet ecosystems for consumers.
Ambar Sur, CEO of TerraPay, comments: “TerraPay connects today more than 100 digital wallets and we have been developing the technology to support interoperability since our inception. The formation of this council marks a significant milestone in our mission to drive the next wave of wallet evolution, bringing the local user experience to the global scale.”