Payment technology giant Fiserv has entered a strategic partnership with Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments network Thunes, enabling platforms and marketplaces to disburse funds in real time to recipients across more than 130 countries. The collaboration, announced via a PR Newswire release, positions Fiserv’s Carat platform as a more complete payout solution for businesses managing high volumes of international disbursements, from gig economy operators to e-commerce marketplaces. As demand for instant settlement infrastructure accelerates globally, the deal underscores how established financial technology incumbents are increasingly turning to specialist network providers to close gaps in their international reach. The broader shift toward real-time platform payments reflects mounting pressure on businesses to move money as fast as goods and services are delivered.
Under the terms of the agreement, Thunes will act as a key infrastructure layer within Fiserv’s global payout capabilities, allowing Carat clients to initiate cross-border transfers through a single API connection rather than managing relationships with dozens of local payment rails and banking partners. Thunes operates a proprietary network that connects directly to local payment schemes, mobile wallets, and bank accounts in emerging and developed markets alike, covering regions including Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — corridors that have historically presented friction for multinational platforms.
Closing the Gap in Emerging Market Coverage
For platforms operating at scale, the ability to pay out to workers, vendors, or partners in markets with limited traditional banking infrastructure has long been a competitive and operational challenge. Thunes has built its network specifically to address this problem, connecting to more than 7 billion mobile wallets and bank accounts globally. By integrating this capability into Carat, Fiserv enables its clients to reach recipients who may rely on mobile money services such as M-Pesa in East Africa or GCash in the Philippines, rather than conventional bank accounts.
The partnership is particularly significant for the gig and platform economy segment, where payout speed and geographic reach are direct determinants of worker retention and satisfaction. Companies operating ride-hailing, freelance, or delivery services in multiple regions can now route earnings disbursements through a single Fiserv integration rather than maintaining separate payout vendors for each territory. Industry analysts have noted that fragmented payout infrastructure can add between two and five percentage points to operational costs for platforms active in more than ten markets, making consolidation onto unified rails a meaningful efficiency gain.
Strategic Logic for Both Firms
For Fiserv, which reported full-year revenue of approximately 19.7 billion dollars in its most recent fiscal year, the Thunes integration extends the competitive positioning of Carat at a time when rivals including Stripe, Adyen, and PayPal have been aggressively expanding their own cross-border payout offerings. Adding real-time disbursement capability across emerging markets without building proprietary local network infrastructure allows Fiserv to accelerate its product roadmap while managing capital deployment more efficiently.
Thunes, meanwhile, gains distribution access to Fiserv’s substantial base of enterprise and platform clients, many of which are already embedded in the Carat ecosystem for their domestic payment processing needs. The deal effectively converts Thunes from a standalone network provider into a critical component of a globally recognised payments stack, a positioning that could strengthen its negotiating leverage with local partners and financial institutions as it continues to expand its corridor coverage. Founded in 2016, Thunes has raised capital from investors including GIC, the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, lending institutional credibility to its infrastructure ambitions.
The announcement comes at a moment of heightened focus on payment infrastructure resilience and regulatory compliance across international corridors. Businesses seeking to streamline treasury operations while meeting anti-money-laundering and sanctions screening requirements in multiple jurisdictions are under increasing pressure to work with partners that can demonstrate robust compliance frameworks. Both Fiserv and Thunes have emphasised that the integrated payout solution will incorporate compliance controls built into the transaction flow, reducing the manual oversight burden for platform finance teams. For CFOs weighing the operational complexity of global expansion, the ability to consolidate cross-border payouts behind a single, compliant integration represents a material reduction in risk exposure.