The Singapore payments network that quietly moves money to the wallets and bank accounts the rest of the world can't reach.
THE MARK — A serif "T" closed by a green full-stop. In payments, a period means the transaction completed. Singapore, est. 2016.
Most people have never heard of Thunes, and that is more or less the point. When a rideshare driver in Nairobi cashes out, when a freelancer in Manila gets paid, or when a shopper in Jakarta checks out with a local wallet, there is a reasonable chance the money crosses a border on infrastructure Thunes built. The company sells plumbing, not a consumer app - and the plumbing reaches places banks find awkward or unprofitable to serve.
At its core Thunes operates a proprietary Direct Global Network. A business integrates once, through a single API, and gains the ability to send payouts and collect payments in real time across more than 130 countries, 80-plus currencies, and 220-plus payment methods. Behind that one connection sit direct links to tens of billions of endpoints: mobile wallets, bank accounts, cards, and, increasingly, stablecoin wallets. Rather than negotiate and maintain hundreds of separate local integrations, a member connects to Thunes and lets Thunes handle the messy last mile.
The problem it solves is deceptively simple to state and genuinely hard to build. Sending money across borders is slow, opaque, and expensive - particularly into emerging markets, where local payment systems are fragmented and correspondent banking is thin. Thunes' answer is to own the connections, the treasury layer, and the compliance layer itself, so that speed, cost, and visibility are things it controls rather than inherits.
Thunes is a business-to-business company, and its customer list reads like a map of the modern platform economy. Members of the Direct Global Network include gig-economy giants such as Uber and Deliveroo, super-apps like Grab and WeChat, and a long roster of money transfer operators, fintechs, payment service providers, and banks.
These are companies that could, in theory, build their own global payout networks. Almost none choose to. The economics of maintaining direct connections to every local wallet and clearing system in dozens of countries rarely justify the effort, so they plug into Thunes instead and treat cross-border reach as a service.
On the banking side, institutions such as Banque Saudi Fransi and Africa's Ecobank Group have tapped the network to modernise remittances and extend their customers' reach. In 2026, Thunes and Korea's WireBarley launched a real-time payment solution serving roughly 1.1 million users across Asia and beyond.
The through-line is scale in the places that are hardest to serve. Emerging markets are not a niche for Thunes; they are the reason the company exists.
"Members receive speed, control, visibility, protection and cost efficiencies when making real-time payments globally."
The core network for real-time payouts and collections. One API connection reaching mobile wallets, bank accounts, cards and stablecoin wallets across 130+ countries and 80+ currencies via 220+ payment methods.
Thunes' own treasury engine, automating FX, liquidity and settlement across currencies so members move money efficiently with control and visibility rather than relying on third-party rails.
The compliance backbone: transaction monitoring, sanctions screening and risk management applied across every flow on the network - a hard requirement for operating in regulated corridors worldwide.
Mass payouts and payment collection for marketplaces, platforms, MTOs, PSPs and banks reaching workers and customers in markets traditional banking overlooks.
Plenty of companies move money across borders. What sets Thunes apart is how much of the stack it built itself. Its treasury system, SmartX, and its compliance platform, Fortress, are in-house rather than licensed. That is slower and more expensive to build, but it means Thunes controls the levers that determine speed, cost, and trust - and those levers are hard for a competitor to simply buy.
It also positions Thunes differently from the incumbents. Where Swift is a messaging layer between banks, Thunes runs its own network with direct connections to local payment methods and settles in real time. Where card networks optimise for card rails, Thunes is method-agnostic, reaching wallets, banks, cards and stablecoins through one interface.
In March 2026, Juniper Research named Thunes a top-three global leader in cross-border payments, placing a company founded in 2016 in the same sentence as Swift and Visa.
Bars are illustrative of relative scale, not to a single axis. Figures per Thunes and Juniper Research, 2025-2026.
Thunes earns transaction-based fees and foreign-exchange spreads on the money that flows through its network. Its members - banks, remittance firms, fintechs, PSPs and platforms - pay to send payouts and collect payments through a single integration rather than build and maintain the connections themselves.
It is a classic infrastructure model: value compounds as more endpoints join, because each new corridor makes the network more useful to everyone already on it. The moat is not a single feature but the accumulated weight of connections, licenses and compliance coverage that would take years and considerable capital to replicate.
That patient, capital-heavy approach shows in the timeline. Spun out of the Singapore mobile-payments company TransferTo in 2016, Thunes raised across Series A through D, secured money transmitter licenses in all 50 US states in 2024, and reached unicorn status in 2025 - nine years after it began.
Eric Barbier launches TransferTo, the Singapore mobile-payments business that later spawns Thunes.
The cross-border business is reorganised under co-founders Peter De Caluwe and Eric Barbier.
The company completes its rebrand to Thunes and raises a $10M Series A.
Helios Investment Partners leads a $60M round to scale emerging-market payments.
Thunes acquires Paris-based Limonetik, takes a majority stake in regtech Tookitaki, and partners with Visa on Visa Direct.
A round led by Marshall Wace lifts total funding past $200M and valuation to roughly $900M.
Apis Partners and Vitruvian Partners lead the round; Thunes secures money transmitter licenses in all 50 US states.
Thunes reaches unicorn status; Peter De Caluwe returns as CEO and new bank partnerships are signed.
Juniper Research ranks Thunes among the top three cross-border payments leaders, alongside Swift and Visa.
Cross-border payments is a large, contested market, and Thunes competes on several fronts at once. It sits beside network incumbents like Swift and Visa Direct, card-led offerings from Mastercard, and a wave of newer players - Wise Platform, Nium, Airwallex, dLocal and TerraPay among them - all racing to make global money movement faster and cheaper.
Thunes' position is that of a neutral, method-agnostic network with unusually deep emerging-market reach and its own treasury and compliance machinery. Its expertise is concentrated where the industry is hardest: the last mile into local wallets and bank systems, and the regulatory groundwork - licenses, screening, monitoring - required to operate there legitimately. With offices from Singapore and Shanghai to Nairobi, Paris and three US cities, the company is built to understand local markets rather than treat them as a single block.
Profile compiled from public sources including Thunes, Wikipedia, Crunchbase, TechCrunch, Forbes, Juniper Research and company press releases (2019-2026). Figures are approximate where noted.