Luno has acquired GTXN, a licensed cross-border payments provider, and now offers businesses a single route to move money between developed and emerging markets. Instead of stitching together a chain of banks and intermediaries, a client collects and pays out through one provider, over rails Luno owns, settled against Luno's own liquidity. The result is faster settlement and lower transaction costs on corridors that have long been slow and expensive to serve.
Why moving money across borders is still slow and costly
Most cross-border payments still run on the correspondent banking network. Money does not travel directly from the sender's bank to the receiver's bank; it moves through a chain of intermediary banks that each hold accounts for one another. Several things drive up the time and the cost:
Each hop in the chain adds a settlement delay, a currency conversion and a fee.
In developing markets the chain is longer, often routing through two or three intermediaries because local banks lack a direct relationship with a bank in the destination country.
Every intermediary runs its own compliance and sanctions screening, which can turn a transfer that should take seconds into one that takes hours or days.
Many developing-market banks quote poor exchange rates and add markups that are not shown as a separate fee, so the true cost of a transfer is often higher than the headline rate suggests.
What changes with GTXN
GTXN brings licensed collection and payout infrastructure inside Luno's existing footprint. For a business, the flow becomes simple: money moves in and out through one provider, over Luno-owned rails, and settles against Luno's liquidity. GTXN now operates as the group's cross-border payments capability across its markets.
Why Luno
Luno has spent more than a decade building standing in these markets. It holds regulatory approvals across its core regions, runs deep liquidity, and carries a brand that banks and enterprises already work with. That foundation is what makes licensed cross-border settlement at scale possible in regions much of the industry finds hard to reach.
GTXN is led by chief executive Dan Kleinbaum, who has spent more than a decade building payments infrastructure in emerging markets. He co-founded Beyonic, a mobile-money platform spanning seven African markets that was acquired by Onafriq in 2020, and went on to build a foreign exchange and cross-border treasury business serving corporates and institutions in East Africa.
The regulatory backdrop
The launch arrives while South Africa's regulatory framework for this kind of activity is still being shaped. National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank have published a draft Capital Flow Management Regulations framework and an accompanying Draft Crypto Asset Manual for Cross-Border Activities, both open for consultation. Luno's view, shared with other regulated crypto asset service providers and financial institutions, is that the final rules should preserve access to licensed, regulated innovation so that South African businesses can use the same cross-border tools being adopted elsewhere in the world.
GTXN sits inside that same conversation. It is a licensed, auditable route for the kind of cross-border activity the draft rules are considering, built and brought to market while the consultation is still open.
What it means for businesses
For enterprises that move money between developed and emerging markets, the practical change is:
Fewer intermediaries in the payment chain.
Clearer pricing, with fewer hidden markups.
Quicker settlement, through one regulated provider.
It is a step toward cross-border payments that behave the way businesses need them to.
