Thunes Extends Its Direct Global Network to Venezuela With Real-Time Payouts
The Singapore payments network is adding instant payouts to a market where remittances are a lifeline and US sanctions make compliance the hard part.
Thunes, the Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments network, has opened a real-time payout corridor into Venezuela, adding the country to its Direct Global Network. Members of the network, which include banks, money transfer operators, payment service providers and gig-economy platforms, can now send compliant, real-time transfers to millions of Venezuelan bank accounts through Credito Inmediato Interbancario, the country’s instant interbank system, as well as to mobile wallets and cash pickup points. The corridor runs on Thunes’ SmartX Treasury system and its Fortress Compliance platform, which the company says is supported by more than 50 regulatory licences.
The announcement is a routine one for a network business, which adds corridors steadily. What makes it worth examining is the market. Venezuela is one of the world’s most sanction-affected economies, where remittances are a household lifeline and where any payments company operating must navigate US restrictions alongside local rules. Thunes frames the launch as financial inclusion. The harder question is what compliant money movement into Venezuela actually requires, and whether the release’s picture of it is complete.
What Thunes announced
The expansion adds Venezuela to Thunes’ Direct Global Network, which the company says spans more than 140 countries, 90 currencies and 220 payment methods, connecting to roughly four billion mobile and stablecoin wallets, eight billion bank accounts and 15 billion cards. Members can pay out to Venezuelan bank accounts over the local instant interbank rail, and to mobile wallets and cash pickup points. Thunes says the corridor operates on its SmartX Treasury system for liquidity management and its Fortress Compliance platform, which it describes as supported by more than 50 global regulatory licences and embedded controls for anti-money-laundering and security standards. The release gives no corridor-specific detail beyond the mechanism: no pricing, no volumes, no named member using the corridor, and no timeline beyond the fact that it is live.
How the network works
Thunes is not a consumer app; it is infrastructure. A member, whether a bank, a remittance operator, a payment provider or a gig platform, connects once to Thunes’ API and can then pay out to recipients across the network’s endpoints without building a correspondent-banking relationship in each market. That is the value proposition: reach into markets that are awkward to reach, over direct connections rather than a chain of intermediaries. Thunes says 85 per cent of payments settle immediately and that its network uptime is 99.99 per cent. It has been profitable since its 150 million dollar Series D in April 2025, led by Apis Partners and Vitruvian Partners, and it has spent recent years assembling licences, including 50 US state money-transmission licences secured in June 2025.
Thunes was founded in 2016, and the Thunes Direct Global Network has grown into one of the larger independent networks of its kind, with members that include gig-economy platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, the super-app Grab, and fintechs including PayPal and Remitly. Its pitch is that a member connects once and reaches endpoints it could not build alone. That model depends on two things beyond software: liquidity, managed through SmartX, and the regulatory permission to move money in each market, which is why the licence count matters as much as the endpoint count.
Why Venezuela matters
Venezuela is a case study in why cross-border payments infrastructure matters. The release cites remittances of around six billion dollars in 2025, roughly seven per cent of GDP, with about half originating in the United States. It says about 35 per cent of families rely on them, and that 89 per cent of the freelancers it wants to serve live paycheck to paycheck or struggle with basic expenses. Those are the conditions under which a fast, predictable payment is not a convenience but a lifeline. For a gig platform paying Venezuelan contractors, or a remittance operator serving the diaspora, the ability to reach a local bank account instantly, rather than through a slow and opaque chain, is the product.
Venezuela’s payments landscape has been shaped by years of currency controls, hyperinflation and a partly dollarised informal economy, and by the migration of millions of citizens whose remittances support those who remain. In that setting, the practical question for a recipient is not the fee so much as whether the money arrives, and whether it arrives in a form they can use. A corridor that lands directly in a bank account, a wallet or a cash pickup point addresses exactly that, which is why payment networks treat Venezuela as a market worth building for despite the compliance burden.
The compliance question the release skips
The word the release leans on is compliant, and it is the part that deserves the most scrutiny, because Venezuela is subject to one of the most extensive sanctions programmes the United States operates. The OFAC Venezuela regime restricts dealings with designated persons and sectors, while general licences authorise defined categories of activity, including non-commercial personal remittances and certain dealings with specified banks. So the activity Thunes is enabling is not prohibited in itself: remittances to Venezuela are permitted under specific authorisations, and the company is careful to say it holds more than 50 licences and monitors every transaction.
But permitted is not the same as simple. Operating a corridor into a sanctioned economy means screening every counterparty against sanctions lists, separating permitted personal remittances from prohibited transactions, and keeping the audit trail that regulators expect. Thunes’ answer is the Fortress Compliance platform, built partly on Tookitaki, the anti-money-laundering technology company in which it took a controlling stake in 2022. That is a credible approach, and it is also the part of the launch a reader cannot verify from a press release. The release does not describe how the corridor screens for sanctions, what due diligence it applies to local payout partners, or how it distinguishes permitted remittances from restricted flows. For a payments network, those controls are as much the product as the API is.
The alternatives
Thunes is one of several networks competing for the same corridors. Wise, Airwallex, Nium, Rapyd, dLocal and TerraPay all sell cross-border payout infrastructure, with different strengths: Wise on transparent bank payouts, dLocal on emerging-market collection and payouts, and TerraPay and Thunes on mobile wallets and hard-to-reach endpoints. Thunes’ pitch is breadth of endpoints, mobile wallets in particular, plus its compliance stack. The market is also moving toward stablecoin rails: several of these companies now settle in or pay out to stablecoins, and Thunes lists USDC and USDT payouts among its capabilities. In a country where access to dollars is itself a problem, that option is likely to matter.
Two competitive dynamics are worth noting. First, the networks are converging on similar reach, so differentiation is shifting toward reliability and compliance depth rather than raw coverage. Second, stablecoins are changing the settlement layer beneath them: several of the companies above now settle in or pay out to stablecoins, which can cut the cost of moving value between markets even when the final payout is in local currency. Thunes has followed that trend, listing USDC and USDT payouts, and in a market like Venezuela the settlement rail may matter as much as the endpoint. Venezuela also has one of the higher rates of cryptocurrency use in the region, in part because it offers a route to dollar-denominated value. The release does not say whether the corridor includes stablecoin endpoints, but the direction of the market makes the question worth asking.
What members should ask
For a business weighing the corridor, the questions are practical. How does the network screen transactions for sanctions, and what evidence can it provide to a member’s own compliance team? Which local payout partners does it use in Venezuela, and how are they vetted? How does it handle the boundary between permitted personal remittances and restricted commercial flows? What are the settlement times, failure rates and foreign-exchange costs on the corridor in practice, rather than in principle? And what happens when a payment is blocked, held or returned? And how does the network handle a change in sanctions policy, given how often the Venezuela regime has shifted?
What it signals
The launch is a small, sensible expansion by a network that adds markets the way a map gets filled in. It matters less for Venezuela specifically than for what it illustrates: the parts of the world where cross-border payments are hardest are also where the need is greatest, and where compliance, not technology, is the binding constraint. Thunes is betting that a licensed, monitored, direct network is the right way to serve those markets. Whether it is depends on controls the announcement describes in a sentence and a regulator would examine in detail. The deeper point is structural. Cross-border payments have been getting cheaper and faster for years, but the last mile into difficult markets has resisted, because the constraint there is not technology but permission, liquidity and local presence.
A network that solves these challenges creates value in markets where headlines are hardest to write, but it also faces the risk of changing regulations. Thunes is betting that scale, licences and monitoring will provide a lasting advantage, and that a network built for difficult markets justifies its compliance costs. This corridor will put that bet to the test.