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Nium Pte. Ltd., a provider of cross-border payments technology, is working with Circle Internet in a collaboration using stablecoins for settlement and local currency for last-mile delivery of country-to-country transactions. The project aims to solve what the partners say is a longstanding problem—fast payments that can slow considerably when it’s time for local routing to recipients.
The joint effort harnesses New York City-based Circle’s Circle Payments Network, which Nium is joining as part of the collaboration. The move grants banks on CPN access to Nium’s payout technology, which operates in more than 190 countries, says the company, which maintains headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco. Nium launched in 2014 as Instarem, a consumer-remittance provider.
Nium’s decision to join CPN brings to financial institutions a single integration that lets them send payments through that network to Nium, whose technology then manages currency conversion and delivery in local currency to accounts cards, or digital wallets, the parties say.
The CPN connection allows banks to tap into global payout capabilities through a single integration and monitor transactions in real time, the companies say. It also gives Nium the ability to send money around the world using Circle’s stablecoin, USDC, and Nium’s real-time payout system.
Fast payment delivery, however, isn’t the only challenge the collaboration aims to solve, according to the two companies. “Traditional and onchain payment rails are converging, and that convergence demands infrastructure that banks, fintechs, and global enterprises can rely on at scale,” says Prajit Nanu, Nium’s founder and chief executive, in a statement.
As for Circle, working with Nium has allowed the company to transform USDC, its stablecoin, “from a settlement instrument into a complete payments flow,” says Kash Razzaghi, Circle’s chief commercial officer, in a statement.
Nium in 2024 used a connection to the international Swift network to support real-time payments, sparing banks from having to build their own application programming interfaces to link to that international system. At the time, Nium’s network was settling more than 80% of payments within 15 minutes.
CPN includes Arc, a payments platform Circle introduced last year to speed up foreign exchange while offering what the company said is “sub-second finality” in settlement.
