Thunes Raises $60 Million to Scale Cross-Border Payments

Payment infrastructure platform Thunes has raised $60 million to expand into new markets.

The Singapore-based company announced the conclusion of its Series C funding round Tuesday (June 6), while also noting it had quadrupled the reach of its mobile wallet network to 3 billion accounts since 2021.

Thunes CEO Peter De Caluwe said in a news release that the funding will let the company “further scale our capabilities, launch new solutions, open new segments and make the network even more robust, resilient and efficient.”

“We will deepen our presence in strategic markets, including China, Latin America, Middle East, enabling a better payment experience for businesses and people around the world,” he added.

The company had announced in March that the Series C had raised $30 million thanks to a contribution from investment group Marshall Wace, which led the round. Other investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Southeast Asian private equity firm 01Fintech.

In addition to passing the 3 billion account mark, Thunes also said it now connects 4 billion bank accounts worldwide and has processed around $50 billion worth of transactions, 90% of which are instant.

This is happening at a time when, as noted here last month, cross-border transactions are growing quickly, due to digital transformations and new international settlement rails.

However, there are still a number of frustrations and frictions as businesses carry out transactions across borders, including how long it takes for international transactions to settle.

But many industry leaders tell PYMNTS this situation is about to improve.

“That’s because several future-fit efforts to improve cross-border payment systems are well underway, including next generation real-time payment (RTP) initiatives from SWIFT, ongoing development and experimentation of blockchain-based solutions that include international central bank digital currencies (CBDCs),” PYMNTS wrote.

These and other digital-first platforms and solutions aim to do away with historical cross-border frictions while streamlining and speeding the payment journey.

Building a reliable, scalable and modern payment system needs to meet the “three F’s,” Shruthi Murthy, head of engineering at Modern Treasury, told PYMNTS: Fast, “fraud-free, and have low fees when it comes to the transactions themselves,” she said.

One area that some companies say shows promise in evolving cross-border payments via leveraging blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to help make cross-border transfers and anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC) sanction screenings more efficient by reducing the number of days they take to clear.

“The problems that the promises of blockchain are already delivering on include reducing the cost to move funds, increasing the speed with which you can move funds, increasing transparency, all while increasing the availability of being able to move funds 24/7/365,” Brendan Berry, head of payments products at enterprise crypto provider Ripple, told PYMNTS.