Luno, the digital asset platform, has acquired GTXN, a licensed cross border payments provider, giving it a way to offer businesses a single route for moving money between developed and emerging markets. GTXN will now operate as the group’s cross border payments business across its markets.
Under the new setup, businesses collect and pay out through one provider rather than arranging transfers through a series of banks and intermediaries. Payments run over the infrastructure Luno owns and are settled using Luno’s own liquidity, which the company states will speed up settlement and lower transaction costs on routes that have long been slow and expensive to serve.
Most cross border payments still travel through correspondent banking, and that is the system Luno is trying to improve on. Luno pointed out that every bank in the chain adds its own delay, currency conversion and fee, and runs its own compliance and sanctions checks. In developing markets the chain tends to be longer, often passing through two or three intermediaries, and exchange rate markups are frequently built into the quoted rate rather than shown as a separate fee, making the true cost of a transfer hard to see.
Luno: What It Means
Luno said more than a decade of operating in these markets, along with regulatory approvals across its core regions and established relationships with banks and enterprises, is what allows it to offer licensed settlement at scale. GTXN is led by chief executive Dan Kleinbaum, who co-founded Beyonic, a mobile money platform spanning seven African markets that Onafriq acquired in 2020, and later built a foreign exchange and cross border treasury business serving corporates and institutions in East Africa.
The acquisition comes as South Africa reworks its rules for cross border crypto activity. The National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank published a draft Capital Flow Management Regulations in April, followed in August by a draft Crypto Assets Manual for Cross-Border Activities, which is open for comment until September 30. Luno, alongside other regulated crypto asset service providers and financial institutions, has argued that the final rules should keep licensed innovation within reach of South African businesses, and presents GTXN as a licensed, auditable route for the kind of activity the drafts address.
For businesses that trade with or within emerging markets, fewer intermediaries could mean payments that arrive sooner and costs that are easier to understand upfront. For Luno, the deal moves it further beyond buying and selling crypto, and towards serving companies as a payments provider, though how far that goes will depend on the routes it covers and on how South Africa’s rules are finalised.
Digital Trade Outlook: What stands out is the timing. Luno is launching a licensed cross border payments business while South Africa is still deciding how cross border crypto activity should be regulated, so regulators now have a real, working example in front of them rather than a hypothetical one. Whether that strengthens Luno’s case will become clear once the final rules are published.
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