Costa Rica’s central bank runs one of the region’s most closely watched examples of instant payments at a national scale. SINPE Móvil, a service that connects a mobile phone number to a bank or payment account, has been running since 2015 and has grown into infrastructure that touches a big share of the country’s adult population.
By the end of 2025, SINPE Móvil had connected 4.5 million active mobile numbers to the accounts of 3.6 million people and almost 55,000 organisations, according to the Banco Central de Costa Rica. Those 3.6 million individuals represent more than eight in ten Costa Ricans aged 15 and over, a level of reach that few instant payment systems anywhere have matched.
The central bank further distinguishes among registered users according to how they use the service: 2.9 million both sent and received funds in 2025, 0.3 million only received and 0.1 million only sent, while about 10% recorded no activity. That distinction is useful because it shows the system is not functioning solely as a one-way channel for receiving money; a substantial share of the registered base is actively initiating transfers as well. It also underlines how far the infrastructure has moved beyond a specialist tool and into everyday payment behaviour. For wallet providers, that mix of broad registration and two-way activity is what turns a national switch into a practical distribution channel rather than a one-directional pipe.
The Scale of What Moves Through It
Usage has kept climbing alongside that reach. People and businesses made 747.5 million SINPE Móvil transfers in 2025, worth a combined ₡12.5 trillion, at an average of ₡16,759 per transfer. The service was offered through 45 institutions that year, spanning banks and other payment providers.
“What stands out isn’t just how many people are on the system; it’s how much of what they do actually crosses between different providers,” said Ivaylo Bozoukov, a payments industry executive who has studied instant payment systems across multiple markets. “That’s the part that’s genuinely hard to build, and Costa Rica has done it.”
About seven in ten SINPE Móvil transfers in 2025 were moved between accounts held at different institutions, rather than staying within a single bank or provider. That interoperability is central to why the system functions the way it does: a customer at one institution can pay, or be paid by, a customer at another without either of them needing to think about which provider the other uses.
Who Gets to Take Part
Costa Rica’s rules on participation are a significant part of why SINPE Móvil has reached this scale. Participating institutions are required to let organisations, not just individuals, receive SINPE Móvil payments, widening the system beyond simple person-to-person transfers into a tool businesses can rely on too.
Payment service providers that hold customer funds in colones can send and receive through SINPE Móvil alongside licensed banks. That detail matters more than it might first appear, since providers beyond the traditional banking sector can take part on the same footing as banks, with digital wallets run by those providers connecting to a system with more than 3.6 million registered individuals.
“Instant payments only reach as far as the number of providers connected to them,” Ivo Bozukov said. “A closed system where only banks can join will always be more limited than one that treats a well-regulated wallet the same way it treats a bank account. Costa Rica chose the more open model, and the transaction numbers reflect that choice.”
What This Means for Wallet Providers
For a digital wallet operator, connecting to a system such as SINPE Móvil offers a way to reach customers well beyond its own user base. Rather than building bilateral connections with every bank and provider a customer might want to pay, a single connection to the national instant payment system reaches accounts across all participating institutions at once.
“The alternative to a shared instant payment system is a patchwork of separate arrangements between individual providers, and patchworks don’t scale,” Ivaylo Bozoukov said. “When a central bank builds the shared layer and lets wallets connect to it under clear rules, everyone connected benefits from the same reach. That’s a more efficient way to grow a payments market than asking each provider to negotiate its own bridges.”
The growth in SINPE Móvil’s transaction volumes, up 15% on the previous year, points to a payments market where customers increasingly expect transfers to move instantly and to work regardless of which institution is on the other end. For markets still deciding how open to make their own instant payment infrastructure, Costa Rica’s experience offers a data point worth considering: participation rules that include payment service providers alongside banks appear to have supported, rather than complicated, the system’s growth.
