Compliance as Strategy, Not Speed Bump

In the early days of digital finance, many players, from fintech startups to established financial institutions experimenting with new products, often moved faster than regulation. This push to innovate meant compliance could lag behind, handled later in the process rather than embedded from the start. But that era has passed.  

Today, with regulations growing more complex across jurisdictions and customer expectations for safety and transparency rising, compliance can no longer sit at the margins. In fact, a 2025 PwC global survey found that 85% of executives believe compliance requirements have become significantly more complex in just the past three years.  

That reality is reshaping the way financial ecosystem players, from banks to payment service providers and fintechs, think about growth. Compliance is no longer simply a set of obligations to satisfy. It’s a principle to design around, a foundation for trust, and increasingly, a competitive advantage as well as new opportunity seekers.

From afterthought to first principle

The idea of compliance-by-design is simple but powerful: regulatory readiness should be built directly into the architecture of technology, products, and operations. Instead of scrambling to retrofit safeguards when launching in a new market, firms embed them from the very start. 

With compliance built in from the beginning, products can go live faster because they’re already designed to satisfy approvals. Operational risk drops when safeguards anticipate, rather than react to, regulatory shifts. And when expansion beckons, financial ecosystem players can move across jurisdictions with agility, adapting frameworks without slowing down. 

When viewed this way, compliance stops being a drag on innovation. It becomes the foundation that enables it.

Fortress Compliance Platform: Beyond readiness 

Compliance-by-design lays the groundwork. Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform applies this principle by building compliance into the core of global payment flows. 

Thunes’ proprietary platform provides a unified, embedded infrastructure designed for the complexities of global digital payments. It delivers real-time compliance checks, continuous risk management, and seamless integration into payment networks. By spanning multiple jurisdictions and embedding controls that go beyond the minimum, it helps firms scale responsibly while reinforcing trust with regulators, partners, and customers. 

The result is practical resilience: approvals are faster, regulatory change is easier to absorb, and safeguards work in the background so that expansion isn’t slowed by costly retrofits.

Compliance as a growth accelerator

With platforms like Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform, the role of compliance is shifting from a cost of doing business to a genuine driver of growth. The outcomes are tangible: faster collaboration, organisational resilience, and stronger brand reputation.  

One outcome is stronger collaboration within the financial ecosystem. As Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform embeds safeguards directly into payment flows, organisations, like banks and fintechs, can collaborate with greater confidence. Thunes’ integration with Temenos Exchange demonstrates this. Temenos Exchange serves as a marketplace where banks can plug into fintech solutions. By building a connector on the platform, Thunes gives Temenos’ bank clients direct access to its global payments network, with compliance safeguards already embedded. Participating banks can roll out cross-border services more quickly, without the delays of lengthy approvals or costly retrofits. 

Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform also helps build resilience in volatile markets. Regulatory landscapes can change overnight, but when compliance is unified and embedded, firms are less exposed to sudden shocks. Indonesian fintech Flip illustrates this in practice. By relying on pre-cleared, compliant corridors supported by Thunes’ infrastructure, it was able to double cross-border transfer volumes in a single quarter. Rather than slowing growth, compliance acted as the enabler that made scaling possible in a tightly regulated market. 

Financial ecosystem players that use Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform stand to boost or maintain brand reputation. Customers today place as much value on trust and reliability as they do on speed or price. The data backs it up: According to Accenture’s Banking Consumer Study 2025, trust and transparency are now top decision factors influencing whether customers choose – and stay with – a bank or provider. Concerns about weak data privacy or transparency could prompt customers to switch providers or even stop using services. Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform provides transparency and consistency that reinforce credibility with regulators, partners, and end users alike. This strengthens long-term loyalty and gives financial ecosystem players the assurance that the services they deliver will be seen as reliable and responsible. 

Together, these outcomes show that compliance, when built on platforms like Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform, is not a burden but an accelerator. It opens doors to partnerships, cushions firms against uncertainty, and enhances reputation in ways that drive sustainable growth.

A blueprint for the future

The evolution is clear. Compliance is no longer just an internal safeguard; it has become a lever that actively shapes how financial ecosystem players thrive. 

Compliance-by-design delivers agility and speed, ensuring that firms can move quickly without tripping regulatory alarms. Thunes’ Fortress Compliance Platform adds durability and scale, creating a framework strong enough to withstand both rapid growth and sudden policy shifts. 

Together, they represent a new blueprint for responsible innovation. The firms that thrive in the years ahead will be those that embrace compliance as a design principle and a long-term strategic asset. 

In an industry built on trust, compliance is no longer the cost of entry. It is the architecture of growth itself.

Contact us today to learn how you can turn safeguards into strategic assets for growth.