The Rise of Alternative Payment Rails: What Treasurers Should Know About Thunes–MoMo and TerraPay Xend

The Rise of Alternative Payment Rails: What Treasurers Should Know About Thunes–MoMo and TerraPay Xend

From Treasury Masterminds

Corporate treasurers love stability, but the payments infrastructure clearly didn’t get the memo. Over the past year, a different type of cross-border network has been creeping into the spotlight — one built not on correspondent banks, but on mobile wallets, interoperability layers and real-time settlement rails.

Two developments stand out right now:

  1. Thunes + MoMo enabling real-time cross-border payments into Nigeria, and
  2. TerraPay is launching Xend, a global interoperability network aimed at billions of end users.

You don’t have to like the hype, but you should understand what it means.

Thunes + MoMo: Real-Time Cross-Border Payments Into Nigeria

Nigeria is one of the biggest remittance corridors in the world, and also one of the toughest for corporates managing payouts, refunds or supplier payments. Traditional correspondent-banking paths into the country often run on limited windows, slow clearing, and unpredictable end-to-end fees.

Thunes and MoMo PSB are trying to break that pattern by connecting global send corridors directly into millions of mobile-wallet users in Nigeria with real-time settlement.

Why this matters for corporate treasury

  • Settlement speed: Minutes instead of days. Helpful for marketplaces, gig-economy platforms, travel providers, or any company paying individuals.
  • Lower friction: Mobile-wallet payouts simplify documentation, reduce failure rates and improve transparency on fees.
  • FX certainty: Real-time settlement means less exposure to intraday volatility — a real advantage in markets with unstable exchange-rate dynamics.
  • Access to new markets: Treasurers trying to support business expansion in Africa suddenly have rails that actually move at modern speeds.

This isn’t just a consumer remittance upgrade. It’s a signal: Africa’s payment corridors are modernising from the outside in.

TerraPay’s Xend Network: The Interoperability Push

TerraPay’s new Xend network positions itself as a global payments-interoperability layer, linking banks, mobile-money schemes, wallets and fintech platforms. The pitch is simple: one connection, many endpoints.

If this sounds like the modernised, API-first cousin of traditional clearing networks… it basically is.

What Xend wants to solve

  • Fragmented payment ecosystems: Wallets here, banks there, PSPs somewhere in between.
  • Inconsistent rules and formats across regions.
  • Slow settlement paths when traditional rails are the only option.

Xend aims to function as the connective tissue, the “universal adaptor” treasurers secretly wish existed.

Why it matters for corporates

  • More direct routing options for payouts across emerging markets.
  • Lower dependency on correspondent banking, which is costly and slow for low-value, high-volume flows.
  • Better data quality in payment confirmations — a long-standing treasury pain point.
  • Potential cost reduction for B2C-heavy companies (insurance refunds, travel reimbursements, e-commerce sellers, global payroll vendors, etc.).

If Xend scales, it could become part of the treasury conversation whenever companies evaluate multi-rail payment strategies.

The Bigger Picture: A Parallel System Is Forming

Treasurers are now quietly dealing with two payment worlds:

  1. Traditional rails: SWIFT, correspondent banks, ACH networks, card schemes — regulated, predictable, accepted everywhere.
  2. Alternative rails: Wallet-based corridors, API rails, interoperability hubs (like Xend), and instant-payment ecosystems across emerging markets.

The second category used to be an afterthought. Not anymore.

What Treasurers Should Do Now

  1. Map your payout corridors: If you have suppliers, partners or customers in Africa, LATAM or Asia, check whether alternative rails can reduce cost and settlement time.
  2. Speak to your PSP or bank: Most won’t volunteer this information unless asked. Push them: Which alternative networks do you support? What’s available in my key markets?
  3. Review FX and liquidity implications: Real-time settlement affects hedging, cash positioning and volatility management.
  4. Update internal payment policies: If your policy still assumes payments = banks only, you’re already behind

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