Thunes CPO Elie Bertha on the future of stablecoins and instant global payments

At Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas, Bobsguide caught up with Elie Bertha, Chief Product Officer at Thunes, to discuss how the company is using stablecoins to optimize liquidity, improve payment visibility, and build a bridge between traditional and digital financial ecosystems.

Bobsguide: To start, could you introduce yourself and tell us what Thunes does?

Elie Bertha: My name is Elie Bertha. I’m Chief Product Officer for Thunes, based in Barcelona. I’ve been with the company for quite some time, starting my career in Asia before moving back to Europe a couple of years ago.

Thunes is what we like to call a smart superhighway to move money around the world. We operate a cross-border payment platform, and over the last ten years we’ve built a direct global network that integrates all types of financial institutions across 130 different markets and over 80 currencies. Our customers use us to optimize their payout and payment solutions, with a very strong focus on emerging countries and alternative payment methods.

Bobsguide: You’ve been developing around stablecoins. How did that come about, and what are you seeing so far?

Elie Bertha: We started working with stablecoins about a year ago. We actually announced our partnership with Circle at Money20/20 in Las Vegas last year, integrating USDC.

At the beginning, we saw stablecoins as a way to optimize our own liquidity across our network and also for our customers. The main advantage is that it doesn’t depend on traditional banking limitations. If you want to move value from the US to Vietnam, you don’t have to wait a couple of days for it to clear through a long chain of correspondent banks. You can move value instantly, 24/7, even during weekends or bank holidays.

For a company like ours, managing liquidity across 130 markets and 80 currencies, that’s a big advantage. We often see spikes in transaction volumes on weekends or holidays, and that’s when you need to move liquidity fast and efficiently.

So, for us, it was a no-brainer to use USDC through our strategic partnership with Circle for key liquidity optimization. We also saw customer demand for this – our customers needed to fund their accounts with us in a more efficient way, and USDC funding allows them to do exactly that.

Since then, we’ve seen a rise in stablecoin payments and a rise in customer demand to be paid in stablecoins, especially in countries with high inflation or strong FX fluctuations where access to hard currency like the US dollar is limited. You can think of countries like Argentina, Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam, and several others in Southeast Asia.

The demand comes from many use cases — freelancer payments, family support and remittances, SMEs, gig economy platforms, incentive payments, and NGOs. That’s why we’ve added stablecoin payments as a new addition to our direct network.

Bobsguide: Many small businesses struggle with cash flow. Do instant stablecoin payments help address that issue?

Elie Bertha: We don’t provide lending ourselves, but we unlock the ability for our customers to receive funds instantly, even over the weekend. It means there’s no capital stuck waiting to be cleared. You don’t have to wait for Monday morning to receive your payments; you can receive them instantly on Saturday or Sunday. That’s the value we provide: instant payments on a 24/7, 365-day basis.

Bobsguide: Do you think stablecoins will disrupt traditional intermediaries in the payments chain?

Elie Bertha: There will be disruption, for sure, but I don’t think it’s one or the other. Both ecosystems will coexist. We need companies that can create interoperability layers between those two worlds because, at the end of the day, you still need access to traditional fiat currencies to pay your electricity bill or your local expenses.

We see stablecoins as a way to optimize cross-border payment flows, but there will always be a need to reach local currencies and local financial institutions for day-to-day use.

Bobsguide: Congratulations on your recent Series D. How are you prioritizing product development and innovation?

Elie Bertha: Stablecoin development will continue to be one of our main focuses. We want to respond to customer demand and adapt to this new form of technology, while still working with traditional financial institutions as part of a connected ecosystem.

We’re also recognizing the evolution of new technologies like AI. We’re exploring how to leverage AI to optimize our current processes and forecasting engine – how we manage liquidity across our network and how we run our operations.

And we’ll continue developing our network. Our aim is to be the single point of entry for accessing payments worldwide across any payment solution. From a product perspective, those are the key areas we’ll continue to build on.

Bobsguide: What does your go-to-market strategy look like today?

Elie Bertha: We have two main approaches. We target customers directly, and we also work through partners. Our direct customers include financial institutions like money transfer operators, digital wallets, banks, neobanks, gig economy platforms, and e-commerce merchants.

We also have strategic partnerships, for instance, with Swift, which helps facilitate bank integrations with our system. We work with several other channel partners who help us reach merchants at scale.

Bobsguide: Looking ahead, what do you think will stay constant in the payments landscape, and what will change?

Elie Bertha: It doesn’t make sense that people still need to wait a couple of days to receive a payment. It also doesn’t make sense that using alternative payment systems like mobile wallets isn’t yet fully integrated into the global economy.

What will change is interoperability. We’ll see more instant payments on a global scale, with optimized cost and better quality of service. Everyone in the world should be able to pay and get paid easily, anywhere.

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