Thunes Debuts ‘Pay-to-Card’ to Expand Cross-Border Offerings

Thunes has debuted a solution designed to help customers offer faster cross-border payments.

The payment infrastructure company’s Pay-to-Card offering, announced Monday (Oct. 28), is designed to connect members of the Thunes network to 15 billion cards worldwide, including those offered by Mastercard, Visa and China’s UnionPay.

“This new development extends Thunes’ global reach for real-time payouts to an unprecedented 22 billion endpoints worldwide, by adding to its existing capability to pay directly and instantly into 7 billion mobile wallets and bank accounts around the world, through a single technical connection,” the company said in a news release.

The solution joins similar offerings by Thunes: Pay-to-Wallet and Pay-to-Bank. It also follows last week’s announcement of the company’s new QR code payment solution, which lets foreign mobile wallets and financial institutions access China’s increasingly cashless economy.

In other cross-border payment news, PYMNTS spoke recently with Nium Chief Payments Officer Alex Johnson about the vulnerabilities behind these payments. Among them: the question of whether the payee information is accurate.

Johnson 10% to 15% of payments transmitted across borders fail because of a lack of simple, secure methods of ensuring that funds are going into legitimate and verified accounts.

Around 70% of those failures stem from account information errors, which are themselves manual in nature, as “fat finger” syndrome gets in the way of entering the proper account number or other details, Johnson said.

“And there’s always the potential of fraud in mismatched payment information,” she added.

Managing these failed transactions comes with a cost, up to $120 billion, Johnson told PYMNTS. And this goes beyond the dollar amount — there’s the cost of determining where the money has gone, the cost of unwinding the transaction, along with the operational and personnel costs incurred in the back office.

“There’s a pretty big risk when we talk about making these global payments,” Johnson said.

At the time of PYMNTS interview with Johnson on Oct. 9, Nium had carried out more than 10,000 verifications with its new Verify solution, and was seeing a 58% drop in payment return rats, along with a 78% reduction in customer queries recorded by one Nium client firm, she said.

“When you think about it,” because it is the banks verifying the accounts in real time, and Nium has 95% coverage across banks, “you’re reducing that $120 billion cost by nearly half.”