Reaching the Hard-to-Reach: Designing Payment Experiences for Fragmented Markets
It is no surprise that the markets with the greatest unmet demand for payment services are also the hardest to serve. Challenge leads to opportunity though, as while the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 estimates 1.3 billion adults remain outside the formal financial system, that shortfall is concentrated precisely where remittance flows, gig-economy payouts and mobile commerce are growing fastest.
The commercial case for reaching these populations is clear and obvious: financial inclusion within global finance and markets, to the benefit of the individuals served and the infrastructure able to serve them. The question is how to do it.
In this article, we look at:
- What fragmented markets actually look like
- Why the last-mile problem is a design problem
- Why regulatory complexity is not a layer that technology alone can solve
- How interoperability is what closes the gap
- When reach is not the same as reliability
What fragmented markets actually look like
Payment fragmentation is not a single problem with a single cause. It is the compound effect of inconsistent infrastructure, uneven digital access, regulatory patchworks and payment behaviour, which varies not just by country but by corridor, community and income level. It’s a complex tapestry of causes and effects, analysed in detail by Thunes in the Cross-Border Payments Interoperability Index, created with Juniper Research.
Globally, 79% of adults now hold a financial account, up from 74% in 2021 and driven largely by mobile money growth in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Yet account ownership is only part of the picture. Of the 1.3 billion still unbanked, around 900 million own a mobile phone, and more than 530 million of those have smartphones. Digital wallets now account for approximately 30 percent of global point-of-sale volume, a share that continues to climb, suggesting the infrastructure to reach the unbanked already exists in their pockets.
The infrastructure gap is therefore an issue of payment connectivity: the absence of rails, endpoints and compliance frameworks that allow money to move reliably to where people actually are.
The cost data tells a similar story. According to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide report for Q1 2025, the global average cost of sending $200 stands at 6.49%, more than double the UN SDG target of 3% by 2030.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the most expensive receiving region, that average rises to 8.78%, with three out of every four corridors costing more than 10%. High costs in these markets reflect the cost of serving fragmented infrastructure and the absence of direct, local connectivity.
Why the last-mile problem is a design problem
Payment failures in fragmented markets can occur where the payout rail doesn’t natively connect to the sending system, so the transaction routes through partners that each add a failure point.
Even where the sender knows the nominal channel (for instance, a specific wallet), the sender or their payment provider may not know the real-time state of that channel – whether the wallet is verified to the right tier, under its limit, or whether the cash-out agent is liquid, for example. The issue is not that the connection is ‘missing a rail’, rather that the rail just isn’t working for the connection, and it’s unclear why.
Designing for the last mile, therefore, requires a detailed understanding of which endpoints are active in each corridor, which are growing, and where reliability gaps exist across specific payment methods and local rails.
Mobile wallets are central to this. At Thunes, we have explored the subject of wallet-first economies and the changing shape of money movement, and found mobile wallets in many emerging markets to be used not as supplementary payment channels, but the primary financial interface.
Mobile wallet users will grow from 4.3 billion in 2024 to 5.8 billion by 2029, with digital wallet transaction values rising 73% to reach $17 trillion over the same period — and with the fastest growth concentrated in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In these regions, a payment provider that cannot reach GCash, M-Pesa, bKash or Easypaisa is not serving the market in any meaningful sense.
Yet the mobile wallet landscape remains deeply fragmented, with most wallets operating within domestic or regional ecosystems. Wallets operate in silos that hinder integration with legacy banking systems and card networks, while regulatory differences and divergent local payment cultures make consolidation slow and uneven.
Bridging those silos, across hundreds of payment methods, dozens of regulatory regimes, and vastly different levels of infrastructure maturity, is the operational work that determines whether last-mile delivery is possible or merely promised.
Why regulatory complexity is not a layer that technology alone can solve
In fragmented markets, regulatory requirements are as varied as the payment infrastructure itself. Licensing obligations, AML frameworks, data localisation rules, and consumer protection standards differ significantly across jurisdictions.
The compliance burden of entering each market independently is one of the most significant barriers to speed and scale.
Building local regulatory relationships, obtaining licences and embedding screening processes market by market is a resource-intensive process that most providers cannot sustain across dozens of corridors simultaneously.
Embedded compliance infrastructure, in which screening, licensing, and risk management are built into the network layer rather than handled separately by each participant, is increasingly a prerequisite for reliable last-mile delivery.
In these situations, regulatory interoperability is as important as technical connectivity. Without it, compliance becomes a bottleneck that slows or blocks delivery in precisely the markets where speed matters most.
How interoperability is what closes the gap
No single payment rail reaches every endpoint in every fragmented market. The practical solution is interoperability: connecting diverse local systems into a network that can route payments to wherever recipients can receive them, regardless of whether that is a bank account, a mobile wallet, a cash-out point or a real-time domestic scheme.
This is not a new insight, but the scale of effort required is often underestimated. Achieving reliable interoperability at scale demands pre-established local relationships, active liquidity management across corridors and continuous monitoring of endpoint performance.
Broad geographic coverage, without the operational depth to maintain it, does not translate into reliable settlement.
Thunes’s Direct Global Network is built with this consideration in mind. By connecting directly to over 12 billion mobile wallets and bank accounts, 15 billion cards and more than 220 payment methods across 140 countries, the Network allows Members access to local payment infrastructure without requiring them to build and maintain those connections independently.
Thunes’ SmartX Treasury System provides real-time liquidity management across these many corridors, adapting to local FX conditions, and via the Fortress Compliance Platform incorporates more than 50 payment licences worldwide, ensuring that every transaction meets local regulatory requirements without adding friction to the payment flow.
When reach is not the same as reliability
Fragmented markets are where the next generation of payment volume will originate. The providers that build genuine, reliable reach into them now will hold a structural advantage as that volume grows.
Getting there requires designing from the endpoint back: understanding what recipients can access, building around those endpoints, and ensuring the compliance and liquidity infrastructure to deliver consistently at scale.
Broad coverage claims are not sufficient – reaching the hard-to-reach demands businesses invest in last-mile capability that can serve more customers more reliably and develop the corridor-level trust that drives long-term growth.
The infrastructure to do this reliably already exists. The opportunity is in connecting to it.
Contact us to learn how Thunes can help you reach more markets, from infrastructure to last-mile delivery.
