Zepz Is Building a Wallet and Credit Business on More Than US$17 Billion of Implied Annual Remittance Volume

Executive Summary

A remittance company is usually described as a toll collector: it takes a fee and an exchange-rate margin for moving money between two currencies. That description is accurate about the product and wrong about the business Zepz, the parent of WorldRemit and Sendwave, is now building. Zepz reported more than 20% volume growth for 2025 on a 2024 base of US$14.7 billion, which implies annual send volume above US$17 billion (a calculation, shown below). That volume is the asset. It gives Zepz millions of customers who transact repeatedly, and a dollar wallet, a card and credit give it ways to earn from them between transfers rather than only during them.

The transfer is the infrastructure; the balance that sits beside it is the business. This article maps the seven-step chain that moves a remittance from sender to recipient, shows which steps the wallet changes, and states what is still unproven: the cards were scheduled rather than confirmed live in the sources reviewed, and the credit product Zepz acquired was paused for customers while it was integrated.

What does Zepz actually run when it moves money?

The conventional framing says a remittance firm sells a transfer. A transfer is the visible event; the company that sells it operates a chain of regulated systems, and its economics depend on which links in that chain it owns. Digital remittance infrastructure is the set of payment connections, foreign-exchange pricing, compliance controls, messaging and settlement arrangements that allow a person in one country to fund a payment that a person in another country can collect in local money.

Zepz operates the WorldRemit and Sendwave brands. According to FXC Intelligence's January 2026 interview with chief executive Mark Lenhard, it has more than nine million customers, about 5,000 corridors, around eight million transactions a month, and sends from 50 markets to 130 receiving countries. Who built the company is covered in the profile of its founder, Ismail Ahmed; this piece starts from the system he built, not from him.

The scale figures matter for one reason. Each corridor is a separate combination of sending method, currency pair, licence regime and payout partner, so a network of 5,000 corridors is a network of thousands of integrations that have already been built and certified. That is the part a new entrant cannot copy quickly, and it is what a wallet can be placed on top of.

Verdict: Zepz sells transfers, but what it owns is a built-out network of corridors, and a network is something other products can be attached to.

How does a remittance move from sender to recipient?

The seven steps below follow the chain the Editorial Standard for this node calls for: sender, digital initiation, payment and foreign exchange, compliance, transfer, settlement, recipient. The right-hand column states what the wallet changes at each step; it is an analytical reading of Zepz's disclosures, not a description Zepz has published.

Two facts from Lenhard's interview with FXC Intelligence explain why steps 5 to 7 are where the change is concentrated. First, he said settlement "can take up to six to eight days during holidays to move funds around", which is the cost of holding pre-funded balances in many countries. Second, he also said "you can't eat stablecoins. In most of these countries it's generally not accepted as a form of payment." The two statements together describe the design: a stablecoin can cheapen the movement between companies, but the recipient still needs a way to turn it into local goods, and that is the job of the payout network Zepz already runs.

Verdict: the wallet does not replace the seven-step chain; it adds a state, a held balance, that the chain did not previously have.

What is the wallet, and what has actually launched?

Zepz's letter of 12 January 2026 describes the Sendwave Wallet as one of the most significant milestones of 2025: a digital-dollar account for holding value and sending and receiving money instantly, live in more than 100 countries. FXC Intelligence reports that the balance is a USDC position, that the wallet launched in October, and that infrastructure partners are Portal and Solana. USDC is a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle.

The cards are described differently by the two sources, and the difference matters. Zepz's letter says customers "will be able to spend" the digital-dollar balance at local merchants through new borderless cards built with partners, which is a plan. FXC Intelligence reports that in December Zepz partnered with Bridge to launch Visa cards for wallet customers, with cards set to go live in selected markets, including Brazil, early in 2026, and an agreement with Stripe covering expansion into the United States, Canada and Australia. Neither source reviewed for this article confirms that cards were live in any market, and no later primary source was located. The accurate statement is that cards were scheduled for early 2026.

The credit step is narrower still. FinTech Futures reported on 22 January 2026 that Zepz had acquired Pomelo, a California fintech founded in 2020 that offered a credit card built for money transfers with a focus on the Philippines. The price was not disclosed. Lenhard described the deal as a "natural next step in our evolution beyond remittances" that would "allow us to offer customers access to cards and credit services". A joint statement said the Pomelo product was temporarily paused for customers while Zepz integrated it into its roadmap. Credit is therefore an acquired capability and a stated intention, not a live Zepz product in the sources reviewed.

Verdict: the wallet is live; the cards were scheduled; credit is acquired and paused. A reader should price Zepz on the first, and treat the other two as options.

What does the volume support, and how large is it?

The headline figure needs a precise basis, because Zepz has not published it as a single annual number in the documents reviewed. FXC Intelligence reports send volume of US$16 billion in 2023 and US$14.7 billion in 2024, a fall of 8%. Zepz's own letter states that volume grew by more than 20% in 2025 without giving a dollar figure.

Calculation (labelled): US$14.7 billion multiplied by 1.20 is US$17.64 billion. Because the reported growth was "more than 20%", 2025 send volume implied by Zepz's own statement is above US$17.6 billion. The title of this article therefore uses US$17 billion as a floor derived from a reported 2024 base and a reported growth rate; it is not a disclosed 2025 total. Zepz's statutory accounts, which would give the audited figure, were not available for this review.

Revenue followed a different path. FXC Intelligence reports revenue of US$475.1 million in 2023 and US$420.1 million in 2024, a fall of 12%, and says Zepz exited 2025 with revenue up around 25% year on year, with Sendwave about two-thirds of group revenue by the end of 2025. Interest costs fell 61%, from US$41.3 million in 2024 to US$16 million in 2025, and operating expenses fell 48%, from US$207 million in 2022 to US$108 million in 2025.

Calculation (labelled): dividing revenue by send volume gives about 2.97% for 2023 (475.1 over 16,000) and about 2.86% for 2024 (420.1 over 14,700). These ratios are a rough yield on volume, not a price to the customer. The World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide page states that sending remittances costs an average of 6.36% of the amount sent, as of its page last updated 18 August 2025; that figure measures the whole market's cost to senders, including exchange-rate margins, and is not comparable line by line with Zepz's revenue.

What the figures do show is a company that shrank in 2024, restructured its costs, and returned to growth in 2025 at a level of profitability that could pay for new products. Verdict: the volume is large enough to carry a second business, and the cost reduction is what makes building it affordable.

Why does a balance earn differently from a transfer?

A transfer earns once. A fee and a margin are collected when the money moves, and the customer's next transaction depends on a decision to send again. A balance earns while it is held. The company can earn from the spread on conversion when the customer chooses, from card interchange when the customer spends, and from lending when credit is available, and the customer does not have to start a new transfer for any of these to occur.

That is the mechanism behind the title. Zepz's customers are acquired at a cost and are already identified and checked, so each additional product sold to them avoids the largest cost in consumer finance, acquiring the customer. This is the same logic the Flutterwave stack follows from the opposite side of the market: Flutterwave standardises the merchant's acceptance of payments, while Zepz standardises the household's sending of them. The sender-side position is the more valuable one for balances, because the household, not the merchant, is the party holding money.

The same point is made at category level in the analysis of diaspora payment networks, which argues that the sender side is where diaspora money is organised. Zepz's wallet is the first product in this article's scope to put a balance on that side.

Verdict: a transfer is a sale; a balance is a relationship, and a relationship is what cards and credit are sold into.

Where does the model stop?

Three limits apply, and each is visible in the sources reviewed.

The first is that stablecoins do not remove the last mile. Lenhard's own statement is that businesses like Zepz "are going to have to operate both on fiat and stablecoins", and that winners will combine the two. A held dollar balance is useful only where a recipient can spend it, convert it or withdraw it, which depends on local payout and card acceptance.

The second is regulation. Each corridor is licensed or partnered by jurisdiction, and a stored balance and a credit product are separate regulated activities from a money transfer. How the wallet and credit products are authorised in each market was not documented in the sources reviewed, and the article makes no claim about it.

The third is concentration. Revenue is described as about two-thirds from Sendwave, so the group's growth depends on one brand's corridors. The fragmentation of payment systems that makes a corridor network valuable is analysed in the piece on Africa's payment fragmentation as an infrastructure tax; the same fragmentation caps how quickly any one operator can add corridors.

Verdict: the wallet strengthens the position Zepz already holds; it does not remove the constraints that made the position hard to build.

Why This Matters for Product Leaders and Capital Allocators

For a chief technology officer or product lead choosing a payout or wallet partner, the question is which step of the chain the provider controls. A provider that owns steps 3 to 7 can offer a balance; one that rents them cannot. For an investor or limited partner, the question is whether the revenue is a stream of transfers or a base of customers who hold money, because the second supports different valuation logic and the first does not.

The broader network context is set out in the pillar on diaspora operators, which argues that diaspora-founded companies compete as infrastructure layers rather than as consumer brands. Zepz is the clearest test of that thesis among remittance operators: the infrastructure exists, and the open question is whether the balance business can be built on it.

Verdict: the infrastructure question has been answered by the corridor network; the business question is still being answered by the wallet.

Key Takeaways

• Zepz's send volume implied by its own 2025 growth statement is above US$17.6 billion (a calculation from a US$14.7 billion 2024 base), and that volume, not the fee on any single transfer, is the asset the wallet builds on.
• The Sendwave Wallet is live in more than 100 countries, but cards were only scheduled for early 2026 and the acquired Pomelo credit product was paused for customers during integration.
• A transfer earns once at the moment money moves; a held balance earns while it sits, which is why a wallet changes the economics of a remittance business.
• Stablecoin settlement can shorten the funding delay between companies, but the recipient still needs local payout and card acceptance, so the existing corridor network remains the binding asset.
• Revenue yield on volume fell to about 2.86% in 2024 before 2025 recovery, so the products built on the balance are needed to turn volume growth into profit growth.

Conclusion

Zepz moved from a falling-volume, falling-revenue year in 2024 to a year of more than 20% volume growth in 2025, and used the position to launch a dollar wallet and to buy a credit card business. The corridors are the infrastructure and the wallet is the first product placed on top of it. Whether cards and credit become revenue lines, rather than announcements, is the open test, and the next filed accounts and product updates are where it will be answered.