When Singapore-based Thunes walked away with The Asian Banker’s “Best Cross-Border Payment Technology Platform” trophy on 22 May 2025, the LinkedIn applause was instant. The post trumpeted a Direct Global Network that now reaches “7 billion mobile wallets in 130 countries” and moves money in “real time and securely.” For a moment it felt as if the hardest problems in moving value across borders might finally be solved: an all-digital rail, API-driven, with near-instant settlement in almost any currency.
But the awards circuit—PayTech, Asian Banker, Global Finance, etc.—rarely lingers on the messy 20 percent of each transaction that still goes wrong. Ask a corporate treasurer in Bogotá why a supplier in Lagos received funds two days late, or an Indonesian e-commerce seller why a Thai customer’s refund bounced, and the answers trace back to the same set of frictions that industry studies have catalogued for years. Glittering plaques can obscure the gritty mechanics of “the last mile”: KYC name mismatches, wallet-to-wallet incompatibility, restricted operating hours, capital-control checks, batch processing cut-offs, and opaque foreign-exchange spreads. Awards celebrate the front-end promise; frictions lurk in the back-end plumbing.
The Award-Season Optics vs. Everyday Reality
Awards panels naturally reward scale—number of countries, currencies, endpoints—and speed under lab conditions. Thunes certainly scores well on both. Yet every cross-border payment player, from Swift to the newest stablecoin remitter, must eventually traverse local clearing systems, weekend cut-offs and compliance checkpoints that can erase theoretical gains. A Deutsche Bank white paper for the G20 Roadmap captures the paradox in one line from Swift’s Shriyanka Hore: “Around 90 percent of wholesale payments reach the end-beneficiary bank within an hour, but only 60 percent are credited to customer accounts in that timeframe.” The missing 30 percent is where reputational risk lives—and where clients feel it most.
Where the Friction Hides
1. The Last-Mile Crediting Gap
Faster front-end transmission is only half the journey; value must clear local settlement rails that still close at 17:00 or observe Friday–Saturday weekends. Batch posting means a transfer that races through Swift gpi or a fintech’s instant API might wait in a queue until the domestic processor spins up again. In markets with capital-control regimes (China’s SAFE quotas, Nigeria’s FX windows, India’s ODI checks…) additional manual review can add hours or days. None of this shows up in award-entry speed tests, which usually benchmark the “happy path.”
2. Wallet-to-Wallet Interoperability
Thunes’ latest Mobile Wallet report pegs global wallet transaction value at a projected US $17 trillion by 2029, yet names “lack of interoperability” as the sector’s biggest brake on inclusive commerce. When a Kenyan M-Pesa holder wants to pay a freelancer on Indonesia’s GoPay, two separate e-money regimes and a pair of domestic KYC frameworks collide. Even where both wallets plug into the same cross-border network, payout ceilings, stored-value caps, or disallowed business categories can trigger a manual exception. The user sees only “transaction rejected,” not the four middleware hops that failed to translate one wallet’s data schema into the other’s.
3. Data Fragmentation and AML Screening
The Financial Stability Board convened its first Forum on Cross-Border Payments Data in Basel on 20 May to tackle precisely this pain point—harmonising data so compliance checks stop acting as a drag chute. Divergent name-order conventions, address formats and identity codes give screening algorithms false positives that bounce otherwise clean payments for human review. Fintech “platform of the year” submissions seldom quantify how many transactions leave the straight-through-processing lane because the street number landed in the wrong field.
4. Transparency Deficits and Hidden Spreads
The UK Financial Conduct Authority’s May review of international-payment disclosures found “notable inconsistencies” in how providers show total cost under the Consumer Duty rules. Even a network that advertises “zero fees” may bury a 250-basis-point FX mark-up in the rate. Retail senders rarely separate speed from cost; a Tuesday arrival instead of Monday feels like a glitch, but a £14 shortfall on a £500 transfer is chalked up to “the bank.” Awards shy away from FX transparency because benchmarks are fragile—the cheapest provider can become the priciest after one central-bank rate hike.
5. Liquidity and Pre-Funding
A Thunes insight brief notes that mobile-money operators and wallets in emerging markets struggle most with the liquidity side of settlement, tying up working capital to pre-fund multiple currencies. When a corridor swings sharply, think Argentine peso in an election week, FX spot markets widen and settlement agents demand larger collateral buffers. The extra daylight overdraft fee rarely appears in an awards-night acceptance speech.
Why Awards Matter—And Why They Miss the Point
Industry prizes are not mere vanity; they compress complex vendor-selection criteria into a signal that a CIO can explain to a procurement committee. They also drive positive peer pressure. Thunes’ 2024 haul of three Pay360 trophies accelerated similar feature upgrades at smaller competitors scrambling to stay relevant. Yet awards create a highlight-reel bias. Because judges rely on submitted case studies, they inevitably celebrate best-case performance rather than everyday averages.
Imagine judging an airline solely on its on-time arrival rate for direct flights between major hubs while ignoring baggage-mishandling rates on connecting routes. Cross-border payments awards function much the same way: they spotlight corridor routes with well-oiled correspondent banks and minimal regulatory tripwires—New York → London, Singapore → Sydney—while the jagged edges of, say, remittances from rural Malaysia to Ethiopian wallets remain offstage.
The Metrics We Should Track
The G20 Roadmap has already codified four headline targets—cost, speed, access, transparency—by end-2027. But within those pillars lie more nuanced indicators that would make awards more honest:
- Last-mile crediting ratio: What share of payments hit the beneficiary’s actual account within the same hour the intermediary bank received funds? (The current 60 percent average is the industry’s dirty secret.)
- True cost per US $200 remittance: After FX, fees and inbound charges, how much ends up in the recipient’s pocket? The target is three percent; the real-world mean still hovers closer to six in many corridors.
- Interoperable wallet coverage: How many wallet brands in emerging markets can a platform pay out to without manual reconciliation?
- Exception-handling time: From initial reject to successful resubmission, how long? Hours, days? The number drives customer-support costs and user trust but almost never appears on award slides.
Platforms unwilling to publish these numbers risk becoming the payments equivalent of a sedan that touts 0–60 mph acceleration but omits the recall rate on its transmission.
Signs of Progress
To be fair, the gap between award hype and operational grind is narrowing. Three developments merit cautious optimism:
- ISO 20022 Migration and API Harmonisation
The gradual retirement of MT messages in favour of structured ISO 20022 data is eliminating some of the “truncated formats” friction the G20 flagged. Richer data reduces false-positive sanctions hits and automates reconciliation at the beneficiary bank. Thunes and its peers increasingly build ISO-native pipes, which means fewer Swift translation layers and, in theory, quicker straight-through crediting. - Domestic Fast-Payment System Interlinking
ASEAN’s bilateral QR linkages (PayNow-PromptPay, DuitNow-PayNow, InstaPay-PayNow) are not just retail experiments; they foreshadow low-value B2B flows that skip correspondent banks entirely. As real-time domestic rails extend operating hours, the batch-cut-off problem shrinks. Settlement friction moves from the core to the edges: KYC and liquidity management. - Data Forums and Consumer-Duty Enforcement
The FSB’s new data forum aims to standardise what information must ride with each payment, while the FCA’s tough stance on transparent pricing creates regulatory teeth. Providers that oversell speed but bury cost will face a compliance backlash that status-fortifying awards cannot deflect.
What This Means for Thunes—and Everyone Else
Thunes’ accolade is deserved: its acquisition of U.S. state licences and its one-API access to 80 currencies genuinely expand what mid-tier banks and platforms can offer their users. But the plaudit describes a starting line, not a finish. The next 18 months will test whether the company can:
- Raise its hour-one crediting ratio in hard-currency-controlled markets.
- Demonstrate wallet payouts that clear local regulatory checks at the same failure rate as domestic transfers.
- Publish exception-handling SLAs that survive FCA consumer-duty scrutiny.
Competitors will watch because the first cross-border network to make all of those metrics public—and still win awards—sets a new industry bar.
Conclusion: Celebrate the Plaques, Audit the Plumbing
Awards like “Best Tech Platform” capture a snapshot of what technology can already do under optimal conditions. They are useful signposts, but they do not guarantee a smooth ride on every route or for every customer segment. Cross-border payments remain, as one Deutsche Bank analyst put it, “a crowded fridge of ingredients that may or may not cook into a dinner.” The dinner often fails at the last mile, long after the award photos have been posted.
For journalists, regulators and corporate users, the task is to keep poking at the gap between the marketing highlight reel and daily performance. Celebrate the engineers and network architects who reduce friction, yes—but keep asking for the horror-story statistics alongside the success stories. Until the day that exception queues empty and every US $200 remittance lands within three minutes at no more than three percent cost, the biggest prize in cross-border payments remains unclaimed.