Thunes, a cross border payments company, has deepened its strategic partnership with Visa to enable new endpoints in key markets across Asia and Africa.
This collaboration between Visa and Thunes aims to enhance the latter’s cross-border payment network throughout countries in Africa and Asia, including Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan.
Additionally, the agreement will enable customers on Thunes’ network to send payments to over 108 digital wallet types and bank accounts and via Visa Direct’s push-to-card capability. It will also allow payouts made to Visa cards and accounts in over 190 countries and territories
Floris de Kort, CEO of Thunes, commented: “Our partnership with Visa is more than just a financial investment. We’re engaging with each other’s networks, corridors and payment methods as payments continue to digitise.”
For Visa, this partnership will play a core part in its plan to reach $200trn in global money movement flows, which includes B2B, B2C, P2P and government disbursements.
Chris Newkirk, Global Head of Commercial & Money Movement Solutions at Visa, said: “At Visa, we’re building the infrastructure to enable our partners to move money from any endpoint, to any endpoint, seamlessly. Broadening both our reach and number of endpoints – more than 8.5B today — is crucial to achieving that goal.
“Together with Thunes, we’re broadening the payment ecosystem by connecting to bank accounts, cards, and wallets, ultimately bringing more streamlined payouts capabilities to our joint clients.”
Digital wallets are fast becoming one of the most utilised payment methods across the globe. In the UK, Worldpay predicted that by 2027 digital wallets will make up half of all e-commerce payments in its 2024 Global Payments Report.
Thunes’ CEO added: “There is a crystal clear, untapped opportunity for B2B cross-border payments at scale, and Thunes is delighted to work with Visa to enable these new payment flows.”
The two firms first partnered in October 2022, in a deal which entailed Visa leveraging its Visa Direct Network to enable 78 digital wallet providers on the Thunes B2B platform the ability to have cross-border, send-to-wallet functionality.
