Thredd Debuts Real-Time Payments Tools for B2B Travel Sector

Thredd has rolled out a new real-time payments offering for its travel agency customers.

The issuer processor announced Tuesday (Aug. 12) that it has become the first to offer these customers “real time payment control” via new flexible product codes made possible through the Mastercard Wholesale Program (MWP).

“This new capability enables Thredd’s customers to better respond to supplier needs based on geography, product type and volume, while optimizing business-to-business travel payments through greater visibility, adaptability, and control,” the company said in a news release.

The release adds that the MWP was created to support the global nature of the travel sector, providing greater security and predictability in cross-border payments between travel buyers and suppliers.

With the help of industry feedback, Thredd added, the program now offers real-time payment control, letting issuers transition between product codes on a real-time basis. These product codes let travel organizations adapt virtual card technology in real time, according to supplier or product needs.

“In the travel space, speed and cost-efficiency are critical,” Thredd CEO Jim McCarthy said in the release. “With the enhanced flexible product code feature, enabled through the Mastercard Wholesale Program, OTAs and other travel clients can unlock more agile and scalable payment flows, while keeping operational overhead to a minimum.”

PYMNTS spoke recently with Edwin Poot, chief technology officer at Thredd, about the company’s efforts to help banks and FinTechs embrace agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to pioneer intelligent transaction orchestration.

“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.

Poot added 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 even tens of thousands) of agents running all 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.”

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