Terra, a new firm backed by Indian vendor Mahindra Comviva, is offering a wholesale, mobile-first remittance service to wallet providers.

The firm is offering its Terra Connect suite of APIs to wallet providers wanting to develop international remittance services.

Terra’s announcement said less than two per cent of the international remittance market in Africa is currently carried on mobile networks, indicating a sizeable opportunity to grow.

It said mobile wallet providers tend to develop their own proprietary services at present or set up bilateral arrangements with service providers, which tend to only operate on high-volume corridors.

“These models are complex, inefficient and non-scalable and mired by lengthy contractual negotiation and prolonged time to revenue,” it said.

The Connect API suite offers remittance service providers a means to plug into the Terra network from which they send and receive money to and from any mobile wallet accounts.

But Terra is not the only firm interested in being a hub. For instance, TransferTo collects funds from banks, money transfer firms, operators and MVNOs and routes them to pre-paid account and mobile money accounts in the developing world.