Thunes Co-Founder Steps Back In as CEO
Hey Payments Fanatic!
Big move at Singapore’s cross-border payments player Thunes. Co-founder Peter De Caluwe is back in the CEO seat after 18 months as deputy chairman. He takes over from Floris de Kort, who previously led the firm.
Scroll for more of today’s top news in the payments world 👇
But before you get into today's top news updates, this week's FinTech Quiz is live. Shoutout to last week's winners, Bruno Leite and Camilo Freedman, who got all 11/11 answers correct!
Enjoy, and see you back tomorrow!
Cheers,
Do you think you know FinTech? Let's see…
Which U.S. state just became the first to launch a state-issued stablecoin?
A) Wyoming B) Texas C) Florida D) Nevada
NEWS
🌎 Bitso Business and BVNK team on faster payments across Europe and Latin America. BVNK is trusting Bitso Business's local payment infrastructure to enable its clients to make payouts in Latin America. And Bitso Business is leveraging BVNK’s platform to allow companies worldwide to make seamless international transfers, powered by stablecoins.
🇺🇸 Peter De Caluwe returns as CEO of Thunes during strong growth and profitable expansion. Thunes secures operational licenses across all 50 US states, supporting ambitious expansion plans. Acquisition of Tilia strengthens Thunes’ presence in US gaming and creator economy payments.
🇺🇸 Global credit card security protection to end loss? AI unicorn PayX, a subsidiary of World TradeX, claims it can make losses vanish. PayX says it has cracked what banks and credit card giants have spent decades and billions trying to solve: credit fraud.
🇺🇸 Zil Money adds AI-powered virtual card features. These features are designed to provide businesses with real-time insights and complete control over their expenses. Businesses can now automatically track spending, with detailed breakdowns by category, merchant, and more, offering unparalleled visibility into financial transactions.
🇨🇦 Payments Canada prepares PSPs for Real-Time Rail participation with a new guide. The guide outlines the process for becoming a Payments Canada member and RTR participant, along with the technical, operational, and business requirements to participate. With real-time settlement, PSPs can eliminate credit risk between participants, freeing liquidity and strengthening financial stability.
🇺🇸 Revolut has transit fares covered for thousands of new customers across New York City. Revolut is launching an initiative to help thousands of New Yorkers explore the city with ease this summer. New customers will receive 100% cashback on up to five single tap-to-pay local MTA rides paid for with their Revolut card.
🇦🇪 American Express Card payments are now accepted at Skiply. The partnership aims to provide American Express Card Members with a seamless and secure solution for managing school-related payments in over 400 educational merchants, including schools in the United Arab Emirates.
🇩🇪 ING Germany joins Wero. The initiative will allow clients to send and receive money directly from one bank account to another, through the process of leveraging just a phone number. This will take place with no need for IBANs or third-party providers, making it simple to split a bill, send a gift, or settle up.
🇺🇸 Webull announces return of cryptocurrency trading for its US clients. With this update, users can now manage their Webull Pay accounts directly within the Webull app, making it more streamlined to open an account and trade crypto all in one place.
GOLDEN NUGGET
🚨 How to Power Payments with AI — by DEUNA👇 Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻
Modern payments no longer just process — they reason, adapt, and optimize.
This post breaks down the architecture of an AI-native payments ecosystem — and how leading enterprises are using it to reduce friction, improve approval rates, and drive intelligent growth.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬
AI connects the dots between data, security, speed, personalization, and behavior — enabling intelligent action in real time.
🔹 Security
→ Real-time fraud scoring and behavioral anomaly detection.
Microsoft leverages AI to detect coordinated fraud attacks across geographies, using real-time IP fingerprinting and dynamic 3DS decisions.
🔹 Speed
→ Automated decisioning and optimized checkout logic.
eBay deploys AI models to streamline its global checkout flow, dynamically adjusting the experience by market, device, and payment method usage trends.
🔹 Personalization
→ Adaptive routing and dynamic UX.
Checkout.com enables merchants to personalize payment options at checkout based on customer history, issuer behavior, and local preferences.
🔹 Behavioral Data
→ Continuous learning from patterns in issuer behavior, retries, fraud triggers, and consumer habits.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬
1️⃣ Unified Data
→ Consolidation of data from PSPs (e.g., Getnet, Checkout.com), fraud tools, CRMs, and internal commerce systems.
→ eBay standardizes transaction-level data across global PSPs and marketplaces to enable unified performance insights and routing logic.
2️⃣ Agentic Intelligence
→ A reasoning layer that evaluates and ranks millions of routing paths, retries, and fraud strategies based on expected outcome.
→ Getnet merchants in LATAM use ATHIA to switch routing strategies in real time during issuer outages.
3️⃣ Machine Learning
→ ML models tailored to commerce — optimizing for approval rates, fraud risk, customer type, and payment method behavior.
→ Google uses ATHIA's ML models to proactively adjust retry windows for license renewals based on historical bank acceptance timing.
4️⃣ Analysis & Visualization
→ Data is transformed into dynamic visualizations that surface anomalies and opportunities without requiring deep SQL or manual dashboards.
→ Stripe provides merchants with visual routing breakdowns and simulated outcomes
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞: 𝐀 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐬 — 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬
✅ Contextual checkout experiences by geography and device
✅ Lower transaction costs via intelligent acquirer routing
✅ Higher approval rates through dynamic retries
✅ Reduced fraud and false declines with adaptive scoring
AI in payments is no longer experimental. It's the backbone of scalable, programmable commerce. Intelligence in motion.
Source: DEUNA
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