Aljazira Bank to Route Remittances Through Thunes Network
The Saudi lender will use Thunes' Direct Global Network to add real-time payouts to bank accounts and mobile wallets across Asia Pacific, Europe and the Gulf.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
Aljazira Bank is rewiring how its customers send money out of the country. The Saudi lender will plug its international remittance service into Thunes' Direct Global Network under a deal the two companies have reached, with the aim of making overseas transfers faster and more dependable.
The change lands first on retail customers. Under the arrangement, they will be able to send funds in real time to bank accounts and mobile wallets, and the bank's service will pick up new payout endpoints and destinations along the way.
Thunes' network covers high-volume corridors in Asia Pacific, Europe and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Those are the routes where remittance traffic is densest, and where a slow hop between intermediaries is most likely to be noticed by the person waiting at the other end.
Fahad Almutairi, who heads retail digital banking and payments at Aljazira Bank, said the bank is focused on customer access and on moving money into accounts faster across key international corridors. He set that priority against two shifts in the market: continued innovation in payment technology, and the growing popularity of mobile wallets.
For Thunes, the agreement extends a set of partnerships it has assembled with established, highly regulated institutions in Saudi Arabia.
Ahmad Yaacoub, Thunes' vice president for MENA and country head for Saudi Arabia, said the tie-up connects the Kingdom to the world and changes how millions of people send money home.
Remittances have turned into a competitive battleground for Gulf banks. Exchange houses and app-based transfer services spent years pulling customers away with quick delivery and low fees, and banks have answered by buying access to networks instead of building links corridor by corridor. Wallet payouts matter in that contest. In many destination markets a recipient's first account is a phone rather than a branch, so the last mile of a transfer is increasingly a credit to a wallet, not a deposit at a counter.
What Aljazira Bank gets right away is reach. It can hand customers a set of endpoints across Asia Pacific, Europe and the Gulf without negotiating each one itself — and the measure of the deal will be how many of those corridors it switches on, and how soon.
