Breaking Borders: How Palla Financial Is Reinventing International Payments

Samantha Wells
Aug 6
3 min read

What Palla Financial does

Palla Financial enables U.S. financial institutions—banks, fintechs, and credit unions—to offer seamless international payments directly inside their digital apps. By embedding Palla’s infrastructure, these partners can give their customers a fast, compliant, and cost-effective way to send money across borders without building new systems from scratch.

The Current Landscape

The $150+ billion U.S. outbound remittance market is dominated by legacy players like Western Union, MoneyGram, and newer digital entrants like Remitly and Wise. Yet, despite increasing digitization, many users—especially Latin American immigrants—still rely on cash and in-person transfers due to trust issues, usability gaps, and regulatory complexities.

In this fragmented market, innovation is often constrained by regulatory red tape, outdated tech infrastructure, and closed ecosystems.

Palla Financial Birth Story

Palla Financial was founded after recognizing a recurring pain point: immigrants in the U.S. consistently struggled to send money to loved ones efficiently, affordably, and transparently. The founders, having deep roots in both financial services and Latin American markets, saw firsthand how existing services failed to meet user expectations—especially for tech-savvy families seeking reliable, digital-first solutions.

From this problem, Palla was born—not just as a remittance app, but as a full-stack financial platform tailored to the needs of migrants.

The Palla Financial Solution

Palla Financial powers embedded cross-border payment infrastructure for banks and financial institutions in Latin America. By integrating Palla’s technology directly into their digital platforms, these institutions can offer their customers a seamless way to request and receive money from the U.S.—all within their own mobile banking apps.

This embedded model allows Latin American banks to provide a fully native user experience, eliminating the need for third-party remittance apps or cash-based services. With Palla, users can initiate a request for funds from the U.S. and receive the money instantly into their local bank account—without needing to monitor transaction status or wait in uncertainty. The process is fast, reliable, and transparent.

Palla handles the complex cross-border backend: licensing, compliance, FX conversion, local settlement, and U.S. bank connectivity. The company enables each partner institution to offer a fully compliant international transfer solution, with minimal technical effort and no regulatory burden.

Central to Palla’s platform is the partnerships with regulated financial institutions in both sending and receiving countries. This ensures every transaction is secure, auditable, and fully aligned with both U.S. and Latin American financial regulations.

Unlike traditional remittance providers that operate outside the banking system, Palla brings cross-border payments inside the regulated financial institutions—enabling an integrated, modern, and more trustworthy experience for users and their families.

Since launch, Palla has gone live with major banks and wallet providers in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Andean Region, enabling partners to process U.S.-to-Latin America transfers in real time. With hundreds of thousands of end users already benefiting from instant, in-app remittances—and a growing list of partners across the region—Palla is fast becoming the preferred cross-border payments partner for Latin American banks.

A Palla Customer Story

A Mexican single mother living in Los Angeles shared how Palla changed how she supports her elderly parents in Guadalajara. Before Palla, she relied on cash services that charged high fees and involved long waits. With Palla, she now sends funds in seconds at any time of the day so that they can pay their bills, and tracks everything from her phone—no more weekend errands or lost receipts. "It just takes a couple of seconds and the money is there."

The Palla Team Culture

Palla's team is made up of technologists, product designers, and financial experts from the US and Mexico. The culture combines startup urgency with deep empathy for users. We are a remote company born with the pandemic so we spend much of our time in video chats.