Thredd Helps Reap Expand Card Programs to US

Payments processor Thredd has expanded its partnership with card program company Reap.

With this collaboration, Thredd will provide the infrastructure upholding Reap’s physical and virtual card programs, allowing the company to expand into the U.S. and Latin America, Thredd said in a Wednesday (Sept. 17) news release.

“This collaboration enables Reap to focus on product innovation while Thredd underpins their expansion, enabling corporate, B2B and B2B2C clients, particularly in fast-evolving markets, to issue cards swiftly and securely,” said Thredd CEO Jim McCarthy. “From initial design, to tokenisation and fraud protection, our infrastructure is built to handle ambitious growth and complex needs.”

As Reap expands via “stablecoin-enabled infrastructure,” it has turned to Thredd for support with authorization, transaction processing, fraud controls, tokenization and digital wallet integration, the release added.

The companies first joined forces in 2021, with Thredd helping Reap go from processing thousands in monthly card transactions to millions in monthly transactions.

“The partnership between Thredd and Reap demonstrates how modular payment infrastructure, supported by deep technical expertise, empowers FinTechs to scale operations across borders rapidly turning card programmes into everyday global infrastructure,” the release added.

PYMNTS spoke recently with Edwin Poot, Thredd’s chief technology officer, about his company’s work in helping banks and FinTechs embrace agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to pioneer intelligent transaction orchestration, and thus go beyond traditional automation for greater efficiency and a better customer experience.

This shift, that report said, is designed to redefine how financial institutions issue and manage cards, optimize real-time decisions and deal with sophisticated fraud, charting a course toward a more responsive financial ecosystem.

But the path toward this intelligent future is not without its challenges, chiefly centering on developing the infrastructure to bolster widespread AI deployment.

“I think what people usually tend to forget is … once this takes off and you’ll deploy agents per transaction, this will require changes to the infrastructure and the ways in which you manage those agents. People can underestimate that,” said Poot.

He went on to say that while there is a lot of focus on specific use cases, the critical question remains whether the underlying infrastructure can support potentially thousands (or tens of thousands) of agents running at once and accessing application programming interfaces (APIs) at speeds that surpass human capabilities.

“This intense activity places immense strain on existing APIs and infrastructure, further complicating the need to authenticate and ensure agents are not malicious,” PYMNTS wrote. “Scaling these solutions to a large, business-ready level remains the central challenge for the coming years.”