Cross River Partners with Hatch to Explore Global Fintech Opportunities in Sri Lanka

Cross River, a global financial infrastructure platform founded by fintech pioneer Gilles Gade, has brought its global expansion efforts to Sri Lanka, with EVP and Chief AI Officer Pravesh Rijal visiting Colombo recently.

Rijal’s visit, facilitated by Hatch, one of Sri Lanka’s leading startup and innovation hubs, and its founder Jeevan Gnanam, included meetings with senior executives from several of the country’s major banks, the Fintech Forum, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and the Presidential Secretariat. Discussions focused on enabling faster cross-border payments, expanding access to modern financial infrastructure for Sri Lankan businesses, and exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping the movement of money and the future of financial services.

The visit marks a significant step in exploring opportunities to connect Sri Lanka’s financial ecosystem with global payment networks and next-generation financial technology. Cross River’s strategy centres on building regulated US dollar infrastructure that banks, fintech companies, and businesses worldwide can access to support international transactions and financial innovation. By connecting payment networks across currencies and markets, the platform aims to reduce friction in cross-border transactions while working alongside local financial institutions rather than replacing them.

Cross River already powers some of the world’s leading technology and fintech companies, including Stripe, X Money, Coinbase, Affirm, and Upgrade. The company pioneered embedded finance through a technology platform built on its own real-time banking core. Today, Cross River operates at the intersection of banking, fintech, artificial intelligence, and agentic commerce, as it continues to expand its global reach.

Hatch: Building Bridges Between Sri Lanka’s Startup Ecosystem and Global Innovation Hatch plays a central role in strengthening Sri Lanka’s startup ecosystem by connecting entrepreneurs with corporates, investors, development partners, and international markets. Through its incubation and acceleration programmes, corporate innovation partnerships, and investment- readiness initiatives, Hatch supports startups in validating business models, accessing markets, attracting investment, scaling their solutions and continues to build pathways for Sri Lankan innovation to connect with global opportunities. Its role in facilitating Cross River’s visit reflects this broader mission of bringing international expertise, capital, and technology partnerships into Sri Lanka’s financial and innovation ecosystem.

The engagement opens the door for further dialogue on how global financial infrastructure can support Sri Lanka’s evolving digital economy, including opportunities for fintech innovation, cross- border commerce, and collaboration between international financial technology providers and local institutions.

As Cross River continues to expand into new markets, Sri Lanka presents an opportunity to explore how established financial infrastructure and emerging local innovation can work together to create more connected, accessible, and efficient financial services.