Singapore-headquartered Sunrate remains one of the leading B2B-focused cross-border payments and treasury management companies in Asia. We sat down with Sunrate CEO Paul Meng at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas to find out more about the company’s recent developments and plans for the future.
Founded in 2016, Sunrate enables companies to operate and scale across over 190 countries and regions with its payment infrastructure, solutions and global network. According to Sunrate, its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $300m and the company continues to expand rapidly, having secured a payment business licence in China through its acquisition of Transfar Pay in August 2025 – which it officially renamed Sunrate Pay earlier this year.
It also secured a Money Services Business licence from Malaysia’s central bank in April 2026, enabling it to offer money remittance services in Malaysia. These bolstered Sunrate’s existing licence portfolio, which includes Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and the UK.
Sunrate has also developed a range of AI-native solutions in the last two years, culminating in the official launch of Sunrate.AI, an ecosystem of AI-native payment infrastructure comprising five different agents: the Payment Agent, FX Agent, Compliance Agent, Onboarding Agent and Chat Agent. These solutions are designed to compliantly help companies automate and optimise payment and treasury processes.
We caught up with Sunrate CEO Paul Meng to discuss how the company’s strategy has changed over time, its AI-related developments and plans for the future.
Sunrate’s evolution strategy
Daniel Webber: Paul, a pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you for joining us. Sunrate has been broadening its offering further from just B2B. Talk us through how the company is evolving now and how you see the strategy developing.
Paul Meng: Sure. Sunrate is a B2B cross-border payment company. We started by helping importers based in Asia to make payments globally. Then gradually, we moved to the export sectors and then we looked at other verticals, such as global travel and international education. Now I would say Sunrate is a leading B2B cross-border payment company out of Asia, focusing on multiple sectors and offering a range of solutions to SMEs.
We are leading in a few spaces. For example, according to third-party research, we are ranked number one in global travel and top three in international education payments. So I would say, after all these years, Sunrate has become one of the most meaningful players in this space.
Daniel Webber: Where do you see some of the biggest opportunities at the moment in cross-border payments, possibly further than just some of those industries that you’ve just talked about?
Paul Meng: There are lots of opportunities. The target addressable market is huge in the cross-border B2B payment space. Speaking of these opportunities, I would say there are a few things that transform this industry.
The main opportunity I’ll talk about is AI. We do see how AI can help to make almost every aspect of this business more efficient. At Sunrate, we started to deploy AI applications about two years ago. Now, I would say AI is part of our operation and helps us to reduce costs and make our processes much more efficient. We have built a few agents, from FX agents to onboarding agents. So that’s number one – it’s AI-related.
What agentic payments solutions is Sunrate developing?
Daniel Webber: You’ve talked about agentic payments, which is an area that’s really being pushed at the moment. Where do you see that fitting in and how do you think Sunrate can be part of the agentic world?
Paul Meng: At Sunrate, we are very passionate about agentic payments. In around a month’s time, we are launching agentic cards leveraging the Mastercard and Visa networks. It sounds very easy, but it’s actually not, because you have to go through the entire certification process with the card schemes, which can take some time. So that’s what Sunrate is doing from an agentic payment perspective – first we will do the agentic cards leveraging the card scheme clearing rails.
But once again, that’s a process we have to work through with the card scheme – in this case, it’s not a human being, it’s an agent using the card. The entire payment flow would be transparent, from the clearing system to the end merchant, so that they know it is not a real human – it’s an agent using the card.
Remaining focused on client needs
Daniel Webber: We’ve talked quite a lot about some of the technologies that might change. In cross-border payments, if you look three to four years ahead, what do you think won’t have changed?
Paul Meng: As a cross-border B2B payment company, we have to really service our clients, which are mostly SMEs. So I think that what will not change is the experience we give to our SME clients.
No matter how technologies change, no matter how the clearing rail changes, the way we interact with our clients has to remain the same, which means we have to give our SME clients user-friendly interactions and really understand their pain points, regarding costs and efficiency. So those things need to remain unchanged.
What’s next for Sunrate?
Daniel Webber: Looking forward over the next year for Sunrate specifically, what are you most excited about that you have coming up?
Paul Meng: Sunrate has been around for a decade now, so I would say for the first five years we focused on building the infrastructure for Sunrate. Then for the five years after that, we scaled our business as fast as we could. So for the next five years, we would say we will continue scaling this business while continuing to build and invest in our infrastructure.
There are a few things we are definitely going to do. Firstly, Sunrate has been profitable for about five years. And we are growing very fast – we’re talking about a year-on-year growth rate of over 50%. So the number one thing I would say for the next five years is we are going to maintain the same thing, growing at pace, around 50% year-on-year while maintaining profitability. That’s number one. That’s from our financial perspective.
The future is very exciting for Sunrate. From a financial perspective, we are delivering. As I mentioned, product-wise we are seeing rapid developments, particularly related to AI, which we are already using heavily.
