Interoperability is the next chapter of financial inclusion

The world spent 20 years getting people into the financial system. The next stage of that work is not about accounts at all — it is about whether those accounts can talk to each other. That is what comes after access, and it is the unfinished business of financial inclusion.

What did the access era achieve?

For most of the last decade, financial inclusion meant one thing: get people an account. Governments built national identity systems so that people without paperwork could be verified. Regulators created tiered know-your-customer rules so that a first account could be opened with a phone number rather than a stack of documents. Mobile network operators, banks, and a wave of fintechs then raced to put a wallet or a basic account into as many hands as possible, and largely succeeded. Account ownership has risen sharply worldwide over the past decade, and by most measures the majority of adults on earth now have some form of formal financial account, a change that would have seemed implausible at the start of this project.

The scale of what mobile money alone has built is worth stating plainly. In 2025, mobile money moved over 2 trillion dollars, up 23% on the year before, across 2.3 billion registered accounts globally, according to the GSMA’s State of the Industry report. It took the industry 20 years to reach its first 1 trillion dollars of annual value, and only 4 years to double it. That acceleration is a genuine achievement, and it deserves to be recognised as one of the great infrastructure stories of our time. Whole categories of people — smallholder farmers, informal traders, migrant workers, people in rural areas far from a bank branch — moved from cash-only lives to holding a digital balance for the first time.

Why isn’t access alone enough?

Here is the uncomfortable part. An account is a container. It tells you almost nothing about whether the money inside it can go anywhere useful. A woman running a small shop in a market town may have a mobile wallet, digital wallet, a government social payment account, and a bank account opened years ago for a loan that never came through, and still find that none of these three things can pay each other directly. A migrant worker may hold a wallet in the country where he works and know that his family holds a different wallet, on a different platform, in the country where they live, with no direct path between the two. This is the gap we would call included but disconnected: present in the system, but boxed inside one corner of it.

The World Bank’s Findex research has documented this pattern for years — ownership has grown faster than usage, and usage has grown faster than genuine economic participation. An account that cannot pay a supplier, receive a government transfer, or accept a remittance without being cashed out and re-deposited somewhere else is not doing the job that inclusion was meant to do. It is inclusion on paper, in a ledger entry, rather than inclusion in the economic life of the person who holds it. We have written elsewhere about what happens at the far end of that chain, where a payment finally lands — see the endpoint economy for that argument — and the pattern is the same at every layer: the destination matters as much as the departure.

Why is interoperability the next stage of inclusion?

An account’s usefulness is not a property of the account. It is a property of what the account can reach. A wallet that connects to one payment scheme, one bank network, and one government disbursement system is worth a fraction of a wallet that connects to all three, even though the balance inside it is identical. This is the central argument for interoperability: it takes value that already exists inside millions of accounts and makes it usable across the boundaries that currently trap it — between banks and digital wallets, between countries, between a national payment system and the international rails that sit above it. Interoperability does not create money. It creates the ability to move money to where it is needed, which for a family waiting on a remittance or a business waiting on a supplier payment amounts to nearly the same thing.

Access put money in more hands. Connectivity lets that money move

We see the scale of this problem, and the scale of the opportunity, because connecting disparate systems is the work we do every day. A single connection into TerraPay’s network reaches more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets and more than 7.5 billion bank accounts across 158 countries, with a 99.9% digital payment success rate, built on 31 regulatory approvals and licences secured one jurisdiction at a time. We mention this not as a sales pitch but as evidence of what is possible once a system is designed for interoperability from the outset rather than bolted onto an existing structure. If one connection can bridge that much of the world’s financial infrastructure, then the technical case for interoperability is already proven. What remains is the will to prioritise it.

What should governments, banks and fintechs prioritise now?

Each of the three main actors in a financial system has a distinct and necessary role to play in building interoperability, and none of them can do it alone.

What should governments prioritise?

Governments should treat interoperability as a policy objective in its own right, not as a byproduct of competition policy or a technical detail left to the market. That means mandating interoperability standards for domestic payment systems, granting reciprocal licensing arrangements with trusted partner jurisdictions so that a licensed provider in one country is not forced to rebuild its compliance case from nothing in the next, and investing in the public payment rails — real-time gross settlement systems, instant payment schemes, and national switches — that make cross-institution connection possible in the first place. Central banks that have done this, requiring wallets and banks to connect through a shared national switch, have seen usage rise faster than in markets where each provider built its own closed loop.

What should banks prioritise?

Banks should stop treating cross-border and cross-wallet connectivity as an edge case to be handled through a correspondent relationship or a manual workaround. For a bank board, the strategic question is no longer whether to connect to mobile money and other bank networks beyond its home market, but how many of them, how quickly, and through how few technical relationships. Every additional bilateral connection a bank builds on its own is a cost that compounds; connecting once, through infrastructure built for the purpose, is a cost that amortises. Boards that still see this as an operational decision rather than a strategic one are underpricing the risk of being the least connected option in their market.

What should fintechs prioritise?

Fintechs should resist the temptation to build another closed loop, however elegant, because a closed loop that cannot reach a bank account or another wallet on the other side of a border eventually caps its own growth. The fintechs that have scaled furthest are the ones that treated connection to existing rails as a feature to build early, not a problem to solve after product-market fit. This is also where new layers of settlement, including stablecoins as a new layer of value transfer, deserve serious attention — not as a replacement for interoperability, but as another rail that has to be connected to everything else rather than adding one more island.

What is a connected economy?

We call the destination a connected economy: a market in which every account, regardless of who issued it — a bank, a mobile network operator, a fintech, a government — can transact with every other account, across borders, in near real time, without the sender or receiver needing to know or care what infrastructure sits underneath. A connected economy is not a single network owned by one company. It is a property of a whole market, achieved when enough of the underlying connections exist that the system behaves as one, even though it is built from many parts. Reaching it requires governments, banks and fintechs to treat interoperability as an outcome they are jointly responsible for, and it requires a way of measuring progress that goes beyond how many accounts have been opened — a question we take up directly in a new metric for connectivity.

We have spent 20 years building access. That work was necessary, and it is not finished everywhere. But the next decade of financial inclusion will be judged less by how many accounts exist and more by how much those accounts can do — who they can pay, who can pay them, and how far that reach extends. We invite governments, regulators, central banks, and bank boards to make interoperability a stated priority, not an assumed one, because the accounts we have already opened are waiting for something to connect to.