In Profile: Ambar Sur, Founder and CEO, TerraPay

Payments company TerraPay is on a mission to create a borderless financial world, making money transfers instant, reliable, transparent and fully compliant.

The company, which this week partnered with Dubai Duty Free (DDF), the world’s largest single-airport retailer, to enable 100 million travellers to make purchases using their home-country digital wallets, is backed by investors including the IFC (World Bank), Prime Ventures, Partech Africa and Visa.

For this week’s In Profile, we sat down with Ambar Sur, the founder and CEO of TerraPay, to explore his journey in the fintech industry and the insights he’s gained from launching a global payments company.

Tell us more about your company and its purpose

As a global money movement company, our approach has been guided by three core elements, right from day one. Firstly, the idea that we wanted to make mobile wallets interoperable. It played a key role in shaping our vision for TerraPay and what we do. Secondly, we started with a simple albeit critical question: why can’t cross-border payments be as easy and frictionless as sending and receiving an SMS? This led us to sharpen our focus on enabling instant digital payments.

And finally, we recognised that there was a huge imbalance in how low-value payments were treated as compared to high-value counterparts. Remittances are a lifeline for millions around the world. We recognised that small-value remittances are often far more critical than larger sums; these are funds that would be typically utilised for school fees, hospital bills, impacting a family’s monthly expenses. We saw this gap as an opportunity to truly make a difference while building a strong, agile, global payments infrastructure.

Today, nearly a decade after the inception of TerraPay, we have established a reliable global payments network that is not only licensed and regulated in over 30 markets, enabling payments across 150 receive countries, 210+ send countries, connecting to 3.7 billion wallets and 7.5 billion bank accounts but is also capable of assessing risk and accommodating diverse and evolving compliance standards across different markets. Today, we’ve grown into a company of 700+ people across the globe, all joined by a single purpose: To simplify global money movement for all.

What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?

2024 was a milestone year for us in many ways. Of course, this includes achieving our expansion goals as a company but also, furthering our ambitions to strengthen the global payments ecosystem. The year saw us take some significant steps in that direction.

Together with leading industry players including Airtel, bKash, M-Pesa, Nequi and Sama Money, we launched the Wallet Interoperability Council. As the digital wallet market grows at a CAGR of 20 per cent through 2030 with wallets accounting for over 60 per cent of global e-commerce payments, interoperability becomes critical. Our Council is aimed at addressing the complexities of global digital wallet ecosystems, focusing on creating a unified framework that allows seamless integration and interaction among different wallets.

We have also collaborated with Swift, an initiative in which we are empowering financial institutions to send money to wallets directly from their bank accounts on their existing Swift rails. This initiative directly addresses the growing demand for banks to shift to wallet-based solutions as the growing appetite for wallets reshapes the payments landscape.

In the last 12 months, we also successfully expanded our payout network to 150 countries, adding new countries across the globe, including some of the remotest markets in the world.

How did you get into the fintech industry?

I have been involved in mobile networks all my life. I started out designing networks and then migrated into providing value added services for mobile operators. This was when we started seeing the merger of mobile with the internet. One of the products we launched in my earlier company was a mobile wallet. We sold this to several operators and then quickly realised the potential of wallets in the payments space. Mobile wallets in their initial phase were restricted to domestic payments only.

My entry into fintech, specifically as the founder of TerraPay, was a result of asking what’s next. What would it take to bring this concept of domestic interoperability into the global payments space? I believed the industry was ripe for disruption and there was a real opportunity to solve challenges plaguing the world of payments. I was fortunate to have like-minded people join me on this journey right from the
start – co-founders who shared my vision but also brought their unique expertise and perspectives to the table.

What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?

Working in this industry has been nothing short of exciting. It’s a dynamic world with an unrelenting pace of change and at the same time, it’s one filled with potential for creating positive impact at scale.

The industry is constantly evolving, transforming how people across the globe interact with money – whether it’s improving financial inclusion, making payments more seamless and accessible or leveraging tech to enhance customer experiences, and it’s a privilege to be a part of it.

What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?

The diverse and rapidly evolving regulatory landscape can be a challenge. I wouldn’t call it a frustration, but I believe this is an area that we need to work on collectively. Regulatory fragmentation can further complicate cross-border payments, hindering interoperability and thus, efficiency.

The industry must address these frictions around cross-border payments. This not only includes building compliance capabilities and acquiring appropriate licenses but also understanding that cross-border compliance is an ongoing effort. We must establish dialogue and collaborative policy-making frameworks by leveraging the diverse expertise of regulators and policymakers, industry experts, and payment providers.

How have your previous roles influenced your career?

In the early 2000s I started a company offering mobile value-added services — this included building products, one of which was a mobile wallet that was quite successful. We eventually merged the company, but I carried forward two key learnings from my experience not just as a founder but also from the industry. The first was the criticality of interoperability and the second was the big opportunity in small-value payments. As I mentioned, that’s how the journey of TerraPay began, applying the idea of interoperability in the mobile industry to payments, and along with it began my journey as a founder, challenging the status quo and solving real-world challenges.

What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?

Before we took TerraPay live, I always hoped to achieve great things with the company as we had a solid core team and idea, but I didn’t expect us to grow at such scale. I always thought we’d be a small company, with a handful of us working together to solve cross-border payment challenges. However, I’m glad to have been proven wrong!

What has the future got in store for your company?

The future is bright! For TerraPay, we’re going to continue our mission, taking the steps necessary to fulfil our goal of simplifying global money movement.

One of the biggest opportunities that has stood out for us this year is digital wallets. Recent research suggests that over two-thirds of the global population will own a digital wallet by 2029. By 2026, around 60 per cent of the world’s population, roughly 5.2 billion people, are predicted to use digital wallets. We aim to enable our partners across the globe to explore the full potential of this opportunity. How can we bring cross-border capabilities to digital wallets across geographies? What does the future of payments with wallets at the center look like? Where can we leverage collaboration to create a win-win situation for every stakeholder?

What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?

As we move forward, a few things stand out for me. First of all, the digital wallet opportunity and addressing the interoperability gap that currently exists in the space. It will be interesting to see how we as an industry come together to solve this challenge and the kind of collaborations it leads to.

I also strongly believe that we must not lose sight of a larger goal i.e. to accelerate financial inclusion across markets. This means building a network and ecosystem that is designed to be accessible to all – for markets and people often overlooked by traditional financial services. At TerraPay, we’re working with our partners to empower typically hard-to-reach markets. Integrating with our network enables partners to reach newer, untouched markets lacking in speed, infrastructure, and cost-effectiveness. This is aligned with our goal of reducing inequalities in this complex cross-border payment space.

In a world where millions are still unbanked or underbanked, it’s not just about building the right technology but also using it in a way that makes a real difference.