BNY Aims to Bring Cross-Border Bank Payments to Digital Wallets

BNY Mellon has introduced a solution enabling banks to send cross-border payments to retail digital wallets. This innovative Pay-to-Wallet capability combines the bank's global payment expertise to facilitate cross-border bank-to-wallet transactions in approved markets and corridors, according to a September 28 news release. Fabian Khoshbakht, head of global payments and trade, APAC at BNY, noted that digital wallets are becoming central to the cross-border payments landscape, particularly in Asia Pacific and other high-growth corridors.

BNY's Pay-to-Wallet capability offers a practical and scalable way to support payments from bank accounts to participating digital wallets, leveraging trusted existing infrastructure. The release highlighted that banks in Asia Pacific are among the first users of this technology, with retail digital wallets accounting for half of all point-of-sale transactions in the region.

By next year, this figure is projected to exceed 60%. Cynthia Hsu, head of the wholesale banking product division at Taishin Bank, expressed strong potential for Pay-to-Wallet capabilities to support the modernization of cross-border payments and expand customer choice. A PYMNTS Intelligence study revealed that the use of digital wallets among consumers has surged, from just 0.9% in 2022 to 11.8% in 2025.

Additionally, the study found that 12.1% of consumers used cash for their most recent store purchase, down from 17.6% in 2022, while 3.7% opted for a stored wallet balance, up from 1% in 2023. Research also showed that digital wallets accounted for the largest share of abandoned online carts when preferred payment methods were unavailable, with 47% of cart abandoners preferring to use one, equivalent to 26.3 million consumers.