Thredd and Ontop Team to Ease Payroll Frictions

Payments processor Thredd is joining forces with payroll/financial platform Ontop.

The partnership is designed to give Ontop’s workforce and clients an improved way to access and use their earnings, the companies said in a Wednesday (Aug. 6) news release.

“Our mission is to help companies pay their teams anywhere in the world quickly and reliably,” said Thomas McAllister, Ontop’s chief financial services officer. “By partnering with Thredd, we’re investing in the best-in-class technology and infrastructure to ensure our global workforce has more seamless access and use of the funds they earn, no matter where they are. This marks a significant step in our evolution to deliver the modern financial tools and experiences for companies and workers alike.”

According to the release, the collaboration combines Thredd’s scalable global infrastructure with Ontop’s frictionless payroll/borderless payouts offerings, letting contractors and global teams benefit from real-time account controls, streamlined spending and the ability to instantly move funds across multiple currencies and regions.

PYMNTS wrote last month about Thredd’s efforts — in its capacity as an issuer-processor — to help banks and FinTechs embrace agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to pioneer intelligent transaction orchestration.

“This shift aims to redefine how financial institutions issue and manage cards, optimize real-time decisions and combat sophisticated fraud, charting a course toward a more responsive financial ecosystem,” that report said.

But the path toward this intelligent future is not without its obstacles, primarily based around establishing the infrastructure to support widespread AI deployment. Edwin Poot, chief technology officer at Thredd, said those infrastructural demands tend to be underestimated.

“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,” he said during an interview for the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on agentic AI.

He went on to say that while there is a lot of focus on specific use cases, the key question remains whether the underlying infrastructure is ready to support potentially thousands (or tens of thousands) of agents running all at once and accessing application programming interfaces (APIs) at speeds faster than 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.”