About Kona Systems
Kona exists because mid-market international companies are stuck between two systems that were never built for them.
The banks were built for retail and enterprise. The treasury software was built for the FTSE 100. In between sits a company doing €40M in revenue across three currencies and four banks — and no one is helping them think clearly about their money.
Photo — to be added
Annette Kona Thomas
Founder, Kona Systems
Background
International Law — completed. International Banking and Finance — currently in the Master’s program at Cyprus International University, with a design-science thesis on AI decision-support in mid-market cross-border treasury. Cross-border commercial thinking shaped by years spent working across European, Gulf, and African jurisdictions. Kona is the practical output of that combination: legal rigor, financial substance, and corridor-specific instinct, applied to a segment of the market the incumbents have priced themselves out of.
Why I started Kona
For years, I watched the same pattern repeat. A CFO in Dubai, or Lagos, or Amsterdam, or Nicosia, would tell me the same story with different numbers: “We know we’re losing money on FX, but we don’t know how much. Our forecast is always wrong. Our banks are expensive but we can’t tell which ones. And every treasury system we’ve looked at is either priced for a company ten times our size, or too generic to understand our corridor.”
The tooling that would help them exists — but it exists at the wrong end of the market. Kyriba, ION, HighRadius, Reval: excellent products, priced for the FTSE 100. On the other end: spreadsheets and hope.
Kona is the answer I wish I could have handed each of those CFOs: a diagnostic that quantifies the leakage in four weeks, a retainer that keeps it closed, and eventually a platform that automates the whole loop. Priced for the mid-market. Built for the corridors we actually operate in. Founded and led by someone who has sat across the table from those banks and those counterparties, in those jurisdictions, in those currencies.
The Company
Kona Systems OÜ (registration in progress)
Estonia · European Union
Serving Europe, the Gulf, and Africa
Estonia gives us European regulatory access and a modern digital corporate infrastructure. Our operational footprint spans the corridors we serve. We work in English at launch — with Arabic, French, and additional European languages reserved for later phases as our client base develops.
The Business
How we think about the business
Kona is being built in three phases. We are honest about all three, because that’s the only way to build the trust the business rests on.
Phase 1 · Advisory
now → Month 12
The Kona Diagnostic and Kona Monthly retainer. Fixed-price engagements, delivered by a small team, in writing, with a money-back guarantee. This is where we are today. This is what we sell.
Every engagement in Phase 1 does three things simultaneously:
- Recovers money for the client.
- Adds a data point to a proprietary dataset of treasury recommendations, actions, and outcomes.
- Sharpens the internal models, templates, and forecast engines that will power the platform.
Phase 2 · Kona OS
Month 4 → Month 12
Internal tooling. Not sold. Not marketed. This is the layer of templates, prompt libraries, forecast models, and dashboards that makes every subsequent diagnostic 30% faster and more accurate than the last. Kona OS is how we scale the advisory business without scaling headcount linearly.
Phase 3 · Kona Platform
Month 12 → Month 24
The productized software layer, built on the foundations of Phases 1 and 2. A real SaaS product with:
- Multi-currency exposure monitoring (transaction, translation, and economic)
- 13-week rolling cash forecast with 88%+ accuracy target
- Bank fee leakage detection benchmarked against real market rates
- Working capital optimization
- Covenant monitoring for PE-backed and lender-covenanted businesses
- An executive intelligence layer that tells the CFO what to do next
Starter tier €2,500/month, growth tier €6,500/month. Retainer clients migrate first, at a discount.
Why we sequence it this way:
Every AI treasury company in market today is building a platform first and going looking for customers. We are inverting the order. By the time the Kona Platform ships, it will have been shaped by real recommendations delivered to real clients with real cross-border complexity — not by the guesses of a founder in a room with a whiteboard.
Kona reads. Kona recommends. Kona never moves money.
This is the line that defines what Kona is and what it isn’t. We are not a bank, not a payment provider, not a broker, not a money-transmission license holder. We do not hold client funds. We do not execute transactions. We sit on your side of the table, not the bank’s.
This is deliberate. It keeps us in a light regulatory posture — no PSD2, no EMI, no payment institution license. It also keeps our incentives aligned with yours: we make money when you make better decisions, not when you move more money.
Research
The research foundation
Kona is being built alongside a design-science Master’s thesis at Cyprus International University on AI decision-support systems in mid-market international treasury. This is not a marketing gimmick. Every engagement contributes to a body of research on how mid-market CFOs actually make treasury decisions, what tools help, what tools don’t, and what the next generation of financial intelligence infrastructure should look like.
The practical consequences for our clients:
- Recommendations are grounded in documented methodology, not intuition.
- Findings are traceable to sources our clients can cite in their own board materials.
- The research doubles as an evidence base defending Kona’s own approach.
We do not move your money.
We help you make better decisions about your money.
Every page of this site, every engagement letter, every recommendation we ever make — begins and ends with that sentence.
Want to see whether Kona is the right fit for your business?
Thirty minutes. No slides. No pitch. Available in English.