Caribbean Fintech and Digital Payments 2025: Remittances, CBDCs, Mobile Wallets, and the Race to Financial Inclusion

The Caribbean digital payments market is projected to reach USD 22.90 billion in total transaction value in 2024, growing at a CAGR of 10.92% to reach USD 34.66 billion by 2028 (Statista, 2024). This growth sits within a broader regional financial landscape shaped by one extraordinary fact: Caribbean countries received approximately USD 20.8 billion in remittances in 2025, a 9.2% year-on-year increase that outpaces domestic GDP growth across most of the region (IDB, First Citizens Group, 2025). Remittances from diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are not a supplement to Caribbean household income; in many markets they are the primary income source, which makes the infrastructure for receiving, converting, and spending those flows one of the most commercially significant infrastructure questions in Caribbean financial services. The convergence of three forces is now reshaping that infrastructure: a generation of Caribbean-built fintech platforms expanding cross-border, central bank digital currencies moving from launch to adoption challenge, and traditional banks deploying digital-first subsidiaries and Banking-as-a-Service models to compete with agile payment challengers.

Remittances: The Foundation of Caribbean Digital Finance

No analysis of Caribbean fintech can begin anywhere other than remittances. These flows represent the single most important external financial variable in the region, having surpassed foreign direct investment and official development assistance as the largest source of external finance in most Caribbean economies. The IDB estimates that Caribbean countries received approximately USD 18.4 billion in remittances in 2024 and approximately USD 20.8 billion in 2025, the latter representing a 9.2% year-on-year increase that accelerated sharply from the 5.2% growth recorded in 2024 (First Citizens Group, 2025). Jamaica alone received an estimated USD 7.4 billion, accounting for approximately 17% of all Caribbean remittance inflows and making the country one of the most remittance-intensive economies in the developing world relative to GDP.

The United States is the dominant source, accounting for 50.4% of total inflows to the Caribbean as a whole. The US share is even more concentrated at the country level: 84.5% of remittances to the Dominican Republic originate in the US, followed by 62.8% to Haiti, 61% to Jamaica, and 57.7% to Trinidad and Tobago. Canada represents the secondary source at 10.2% of total flows, with particular importance for Trinidad and Tobago, where Canada contributes 21.2% of remittance inflows (First Citizens Group, 2025). This geographic concentration in North American source markets has significant implications for the fintech companies competing in the corridor: the US regulatory environment, exchange rate dynamics, and diaspora employment levels directly determine the volume and predictability of flows that Caribbean digital payment platforms can expect to process.

A critical policy development effective 1 January 2026 creates a structural inflection point for remittance channel composition. A 1% US excise tax now applies to certain remittance transfers originating from the US and sent through cash-based channels (First Citizens Group, 2025). This cost increase creates a direct incentive for senders to shift to digital remittance platforms, which typically carry lower all-in costs than traditional cash agent networks. For Caribbean fintech companies with remittance capabilities, including Lynk through its MoneyGram and Western Union partnerships, and WiPay's international payout infrastructure, the 2026 tax represents a structural tailwind for digital volume growth. The World Bank's global average cost for sending USD 200 digitally is approximately 5%, compared to 7% through non-digital channels, reinforcing the economic logic of the channel shift (Migration Data Portal, 2024).

The resilience of remittance flows during economic stress gives them macroeconomic significance beyond household income support. Jamaica's experience during Hurricane Melissa in late October 2025 illustrates the dynamic: tourism receipts and domestic income disruptions were partially cushioned by sustained or increased remittance inflows, as diaspora communities responded to family needs. The counter-cyclical behaviour of remittances relative to tourism and export earnings is one reason that Caribbean central banks view digital remittance infrastructure as a financial stability priority rather than merely a commercial convenience (First Citizens Group, 2025).

Caribbean Payment Platforms: WiPay, Lynk, and the Infrastructure Layer

The Caribbean payment ecosystem is anchored by a small number of regional fintech platforms that have built meaningful scale across multiple markets, sitting alongside a deeper layer of bank-owned digital products and international gateway providers with Caribbean coverage.

WiPay Group

WiPay Group is the Caribbean's most geographically distributed fintech platform. Founded in Trinidad and Tobago in 2017 as a licensed payment aggregator, WiPay incorporated a holding company structure in 2024 to manage its expanding portfolio of services spanning payments, remittances, lending, travel, and telecommunications. By 2024, WiPay operated in 12 countries across four regions: the Caribbean (Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana, the Cayman Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago), along with the US, Colombia, and Ghana (WiPay Group, 2024).

WiPay's product suite includes payment aggregation for merchants, WiPay Remittance for international peer-to-peer payouts, WiLoan for micro-lending based on cashflow history, WiTravel for travel services, a Caribbean Settlement Network for cross-border intra-regional payments, and the COLOUR mobile payments app. The company is often described as "the PayPal of the Caribbean" in market commentary, reflecting its function as a regional payment intermediary connecting merchants, consumers, and international payment platforms. WiPay's Carnival Jamaica 2024 deployment, which reportedly facilitated tens of millions of Jamaican dollars in transactions across online costume sales, event ticketing, and QR code food and beverage payments, exemplifies its ability to power complete cashless event ecosystems (Small Business Portal, 2025).

The interoperability challenge is WiPay's most significant structural constraint and a broader Caribbean fintech market problem. As WiPay's Jamaica Country Manager stated directly: payment solutions in the Caribbean are largely closed-loop systems where Lynk sends only to Lynk and WiPay cannot send to Lynk. Building open payment rails requires regulatory frameworks that the Bank of Jamaica and other Caribbean central banks have not yet established, meaning that the growth of multiple digital wallet platforms risks fragmenting rather than expanding digital payment adoption (Jamaica Observer, 2023). The Caribbean Settlement Network represents WiPay's attempt to solve the cross-border layer of this problem by connecting wallets across regional markets, but domestic interoperability within individual country markets remains unresolved.

Lynk (Jamaica)

Lynk is Jamaica's first full-scale digital wallet, launched by NCB Financial Group's fintech subsidiary TFOB in December 2021. Lynk's market position is unique because it is the sole wallet that currently facilitates JAM-DEX, Jamaica's central bank digital currency, giving it a regulatory relationship with the Bank of Jamaica that no competitor currently shares. By 2024, Lynk processed 1.3 million transactions worth J$14.5 billion and had accumulated over 200,000 wallet holders (Small Business Portal, 2025; Jamaica Information Service). Lynk's remittance capability expanded significantly: the platform began accepting MoneyGram transfers in March 2023 and added Western Union through a GraceKennedy partnership in May 2024, making it the first Jamaican wallet where overseas senders can direct remittances to a mobile wallet without the recipient requiring a bank account.

Lynk's financial inclusion proposition is deliberately designed to reach the unbanked. The wallet does not require a bank account for registration, only a Tax Registration Number, biometric verification, and a mobile phone, targeting the approximately 17% of Jamaicans estimated to be unbanked (Traverse Jamaica, 2025). Merchants receive instant settlement and avoid card interchange fees, creating a cost advantage relative to card-based payment acceptance. NCB's ePOS product, launched in June 2024, allows SME customers to convert a mobile phone or tablet into a payment acceptance device, extending merchant acquisition without requiring dedicated POS hardware investment. TFOB is also awaiting Bank of Jamaica approval to launch a virtual Visa card within the Lynk app, a product that would allow wallet balances to be used at card-accepting merchants globally, closing the gap between Lynk's domestic utility and international purchasing capability (Jamaica Observer, 2025).

First Atlantic Commerce (FAC)

First Atlantic Commerce represents the gateway infrastructure layer underlying much of the Caribbean's formal e-commerce payment processing. Based in Bermuda and operating since 1998, FAC provides multi-currency credit card processing, advanced fraud tools, and acquiring bank integration across 29 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Jamaica, FAC is the underlying processor for NCB, Scotiabank, Sagicor Bank, EzeePayments, WiPay, Adpay, and TiloPay, meaning that the majority of card-based online payment transactions in Jamaica flow through FAC's infrastructure regardless of the consumer-facing brand (Small Business Portal, 2025). This infrastructure role gives FAC structural importance to the ecosystem that is not always visible at the brand level.

Caribbean Fintech Platform Comparison

Caribbean CBDCs: Three Launches, One Shared Challenge

The Caribbean is the most active region globally for retail central bank digital currency deployment. Three CBDCs have launched in the region: the Bahamas' Sand Dollar in 2020, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's DCash in 2021, and Jamaica's JAM-DEX in 2022. Together they represent a real-world laboratory for CBDC design choices, adoption strategies, and the gap between policy intent and consumer behaviour that has become a reference point for central bank researchers globally (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2024).

Sand Dollar (Bahamas)

The Bahamas' Sand Dollar, launched in 2020 and pegged to the Bahamian dollar at a fixed 1:1 ratio, was the world's first fully deployed retail CBDC. Its genesis lay in a Payments Systems Modernization Initiative that began in 2003, which established real-time gross settlement for large-value payments and an automated clearinghouse for retail payments before pursuing the CBDC as the next layer of financial infrastructure. The primary stated goal was providing all Bahamians, including residents of remote Family Islands with limited bank branch access, with access to digital payments and banking services. Like the other Caribbean CBDCs, the Sand Dollar has faced adoption constraints despite innovative design choices including an offline transaction capability for areas with intermittent connectivity, and a two-tier wallet structure with different KYC levels and transaction limits for banked and unbanked users (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2024).

DCash (Eastern Caribbean Currency Union)

DCash, developed by Barbados-based fintech company Bitt on a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain hosted on Google Cloud, serves eight ECCU member countries including Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Anguilla, and Montserrat. The ECCB Governor Timothy Antoine articulated the policy rationale as three interconnected goals: payment system efficiency, financial inclusion, and increased resilience and competitiveness for small states vulnerable to external shocks. Antoine specifically noted that the ECCU's small-market size means private sector digital payment providers face unfavourable economics, making the CBDC a public infrastructure solution to a market failure problem. By March 2023, DCash had approximately 400 merchant participants and EC$2.45 million in circulation, representing only 0.16% of total currency in circulation, reflecting the adoption challenge shared across all three Caribbean CBDCs (Cash Payment News, 2024).

JAM-DEX (Jamaica)

Jamaica's JAM-DEX is the region's most extensively documented CBDC from an adoption analysis perspective. Launched on 11 July 2022 and distributed exclusively through Lynk, Jamaica's first digital wallet, JAM-DEX was designed to reach the approximately 17% of Jamaicans estimated to be unbanked by eliminating the bank account requirement for wallet access. An incentive programme offered J$2,500 to the first 100,000 sign-ups, resulting in approximately 120,000 individuals and 2,300 merchants registering in the first month. By January 2024, approximately 260,000 people had opened accounts, but only 2,379 merchants had formally accepted JAM-DEX by September 2024, against a 10,000-merchant target for an incentive programme launched in early 2023 (Human Rights Foundation CBDC Tracker, 2025).

The merchant adoption bottleneck is the central problem for JAM-DEX. Bank of Jamaica Governor Richard Byles stated the issue directly: merchants want to use their existing POS machines to accept JAM-DEX alongside card payments, and the cost and friction of operating a separate acceptance infrastructure has deterred merchant participation. Despite 230 million units being minted in 2021, circulation had only grown to 257 million units by July 2024, indicating that most JAM-DEX wallet holders are not actively transacting (Island Hints, 2024). The government reaffirmed its commitment to JAM-DEX in March 2025, with JN Bank entering as a second wallet provider in August 2025, and the Bank of Jamaica expecting two more wallet providers before the end of 2025. The BOJ Governor also indicated that a breakthrough in adoption will likely depend on converting existing POS machines to accept JAM-DEX rather than requiring merchants to install separate infrastructure (Human Rights Foundation CBDC Tracker, 2025).

The lessons from all three Caribbean CBDCs align with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's research findings: technology choice has little effect on adoption; CBDCs need to demonstrate genuine value-added to change consumer behaviour; and the platform must be integrated into the existing financial ecosystem rather than operating as a parallel system. This last point is particularly relevant for JAM-DEX, where Lynk's success as a peer-to-peer wallet has not translated into JAM-DEX adoption because consumers prefer Lynk's direct wallet experience to the additional step of using the CBDC layer within it.

Digital Banking and the BaaS Model

Traditional Caribbean banks are responding to fintech competition through two strategies: building their own digital products and subsidiaries, and partnering with Banking-as-a-Service platforms to launch digital-first banking experiences without requiring full core system replacement. Sagicor Bank Barbados exemplifies the second approach: in May 2023, it became the first fully digital bank in the English-speaking Caribbean by launching on a BaaS platform provided by US-based fintech company Mbanq. This model allows established banking groups to create separately branded digital offerings with modern user experience without replacing legacy core banking infrastructure across their existing branch networks (Future Nexus, 2023).

ANSA Bank in Trinidad and Tobago has pursued a hybrid approach, deploying "digital touchpoints," non-traditional branch formats with QR code-scannable augmented reality walls and meeting rooms for in-person customer service. NCB in Jamaica has taken the most comprehensive digital banking approach among Caribbean traditional banks, operating Lynk as a fintech subsidiary, launching NCB Pay as a mobile card payment app in March 2023, deploying ePOS in June 2024, and extending into toll payment infrastructure through the TransJamaican Highway card integration that increased toll card transactions approximately threefold following POS terminal deployment (Jamaica Observer, 2025).

WiPay's creation of Colour Bank, a Miami-based neobank serving the Caribbean and African diaspora in the US, represents the strategic insight that the most valuable opportunity in Caribbean remittances may lie not in the receiving market but in the sending market. A Caribbean-origin neobank that captures deposits and payment flows from diaspora consumers at the US source of remittance corridors can potentially own the end-to-end economics of those flows rather than competing only in the lower-margin receiving market (Future Nexus, 2023). This is a structurally different competitive position than traditional Caribbean banks or receiving-market payment platforms can easily replicate.

Financial Inclusion: The Structural Opportunity Driving Caribbean Fintech

Financial inclusion is the stated policy rationale for most Caribbean government and central bank fintech initiatives, and it is a genuine commercial opportunity for private sector platforms. Approximately 17% of Jamaicans are unbanked, and cash remains the dominant transaction medium, with nearly four-fifths of Jamaican transactions conducted in cash according to NCB's own data (Jamaica Observer, 2025). The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union faces a similar dynamic, where small-market economics mean private sector providers cannot justify the infrastructure investment needed to serve low-income, low-volume consumers profitably without public subsidy or regulatory incentive. Latin America and the Caribbean as a region recorded 32.1% monthly activity in registered mobile money accounts in 2024, the highest rate of any region globally, suggesting that when digital payment infrastructure is accessible and useful, uptake is strong (Digital Silk, 2025).

The interoperability deficit is the most critical infrastructure gap blocking broader financial inclusion through Caribbean digital payments. Closed-loop wallet systems force consumers and merchants to choose between platforms rather than allowing them to transact freely regardless of which wallet they hold. The BOJ has not yet established the regulatory framework for wallet-to-wallet interoperability, meaning that Caribbean digital payment growth risks replicating the fragmentation of the cash economy in digital form, where merchants accept only specific wallets and consumers carry multiple apps rather than one digital payment identity. The WiPay Caribbean Settlement Network, designed to connect wallets across regional markets, addresses the cross-border layer of this problem but does not solve the domestic intra-platform interoperability challenge that requires central bank regulatory action.

HRG Research Capabilities in Caribbean Fintech and Financial Services

Hope Research Group supports fintech companies, banks, payment processors, and regulators with consumer research, market intelligence, and competitive analysis across Caribbean financial services markets. Our research capabilities include digital payment adoption studies that identify the specific barriers to wallet adoption among banked and unbanked consumers, financial inclusion baseline surveys that measure access and usage patterns across demographic segments, and consumer sentiment research on trust in digital financial products.

For fintech companies entering Caribbean markets, HRG provides competitive intelligence research mapping the existing platform landscape, fee structures, merchant adoption patterns, and consumer switching behaviour. For financial regulators and development organisations evaluating CBDC adoption or digital payment policy design, our fieldwork capabilities enable quantitative measurement of consumer awareness, willingness to adopt, and the practical barriers that distinguish policy intention from market reality. Our remittance corridor research documents the sending and receiving behaviour of diaspora households and the factors that drive channel choice between cash agents, digital platforms, and bank transfers.

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