An Open Payments Accelerator project by Wava · Colombia and Peru
The Payment Problem We're Exploring
Latin America has quietly built some of the fastest and cheapest domestic payment systems in the world. In Colombia, money moves instantly through wallets tens of millions of people use daily. In Peru, QR payments clear through the compensation chamber in seconds. Inside any one country, paying has never been easier.
Cross a border, and that progress disappears. Each system was built for its own market, with its own rules, its own currency, and no shared way to address an account on the other side. A business operating in Colombia and Peru cannot simply move money between them. It either builds a separate integration, banking relationship, and compliance process in each country, or falls back on correspondent banking and card networks that are slower and costlier than the local rails sitting at both ends of the same transaction.
The businesses most likely to benefit from instant, low-cost payments are often the least able to reach across a border.
Who Is This For?
On the sending side is an everyday customer in Peru paying for something — a marketplace purchase, a subscription, a service. They want to pay the way they always do, without knowing the business is in another country.
On the receiving side is a merchant operating across more than one Latin American market, carrying the fragmentation: separate integrations per country, balances in unconnected systems, and the cost of moving its own money home. For a large company, it is an annoyance. For a smaller merchant, it is often why they never expand across the border at all.
What We Want to Test
We believe Open Payments can help merchants operating across Latin American markets to collect in one country and receive funds in another, by providing a shared way to address, quote, and clear a payment between systems that were never designed to connect.
What we do not know is whether an open standard can sit above national infrastructure without requiring it to change. Domestic rails are stable, regulated, and widely adopted; anything asking them to adopt something new is unlikely to get far. What interests us is interoperability that is additive rather than disruptive.
The Payment Flow We'll Explore
We have deliberately narrowed to a single flow, in one direction, between two countries where we already operate.
Customer in Peru → pays through a local payment method → Open Payments addressing, quoting and clearing → merchant receives funds in Colombian pesos
A customer in Peru pays using a local QR-based method, cleared through the compensation chamber. The Colombian destination account is identified through an Open Payments address, and the conversion is quoted before anything moves. The transfer clears between two connector nodes we operate, and the merchant is paid out in Colombian pesos through a domestic rail.
The merchant sees one transaction and one reconciled record instead of two disconnected balances. The return direction is a stretch goal, not a promise.
How We Plan to Use Open Payments
Open Payments sits in the middle of this flow, not at either end. The local methods on both sides stay exactly as they are.
- Addressing — a standard way to identify the receiving account across the border, so neither country's system needs a bespoke integration with the other.
- Quoting — a consistent way to know what a cross-currency transfer costs before it executes.
- Clearing — moving value between two connector nodes we run ourselves, using Rafiki, so neither domestic rail needs a direct relationship with the other.
What We Hope to Demonstrate
By the end of the four months, we aim to show a working corridor between Peru and Colombia in a controlled near-live environment. Three indicators will tell us whether it worked:
- A payment completes end to end — collected in Peru, cleared at a locked rate, paid out in Colombian pesos. Funds release only against confirmed bank settlement: that gate is by design, not a gap.
- Every transaction reconciles across the clearing record, our ledger, and settlement on each rail. Where it does not, we want to know exactly why.
- At least one merchant we already work with completes the flow and tells us whether it solves their real problem.
We are not aiming to launch a product in four months. We are aiming to find out whether this works, and to be honest about where it does not.
Looking Beyond the Accelerator
If it works, the next steps are real production volume and extending the pattern to further markets, Ecuador being the most obvious. The more interesting question is whether it generalises: a layer that connects two countries without either rail changing could, in principle, connect many.
What We're Excited to Learn
We arrive with real infrastructure but limited hands-on experience with Interledger. That is exactly why the Accelerator appealed to us. Three questions we want to answer:
- How do our cross-currency design, locked quotes, clearing decoupled from batched settlement, and gated release hold up in practice? FX is the one piece we've never operated; pressure-testing it with the Interledger team is the draw.
- Where does the standard hold against real domestic infrastructure, and where does it strain? We expect to find edges the documentation does not show.
- What does a merchant need to see for this to feel trustworthy? Interoperability only matters if the person receiving the money believes it will arrive.
About Wava
Wava builds API-based collections, disbursements, and treasury tools on top of Latin America's local payment rails, for fintechs, marketplaces, and e-commerce businesses that need to move money through the methods their customers actually use. Our infrastructure is live in Colombia and Peru, under local entities and banking sponsorship in both markets.
Our founding team: Carlos Agudelo, who has spent over a decade building companies across the region, and Luciano Pallotti, who previously built infrastructure for corporates and governments and now builds and runs Wava's platform. We came to this problem by hitting it ourselves — after doing the unglamorous work of establishing banking and compliance in two countries, we still couldn't offer merchants something as basic as moving their money between them.
Learn more at wava.co.
Explore our Public API at docs.wava.co.
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