Two roads to the same rail: build it, or buy your way on-chain
In a matter of weeks, Wise switched on direct connections in Brazil and Japan while collecting three new licences, and Nium raised more than US$200 million before acquiring a crypto-native issuer. Different playbooks — identical conclusion: whoever owns the rail owns the margin.
The cross-border payments industry has spent a decade renting infrastructure — correspondent banks, aggregators, intermediary layers stacked between sender and recipient, each taking a cut of speed and spread. This summer, the leading players made it unambiguous that the rented-rails era is closing. They just disagree, loudly, on what replaces it.
On one side, Wise used its FY2026 results to announce two new direct connections — in Brazil and Japan — alongside fresh licence approvals in South Africa, the UAE, and Thailand, and new bank partnerships with Raiffeisen Bank and UniCredit. It is the patient route: regulatory approval by regulatory approval, corridor by corridor, stripping intermediaries out of the stack one jurisdiction at a time.
On the other side, Nium disclosed a Series D round exceeding US$200 million and, within weeks, announced the acquisition of Cypher, a crypto-native wallet and issuing company — a deliberate leap into fiat-to-on-chain movement and stablecoin-enabled settlement. Where Wise digs a tunnel, Nium is trying to teleport.
Between them sits Thunes, which opened a strategic New York hub in June, deploying its own Series D capital to push its interoperability network deeper into the US market. Three companies, three capital strategies — one shared conviction that the infrastructure layer, not the consumer app, is where the next decade of cross-border value gets captured.
Wise: licence by licence, rail by rail
Nium: capital-fuelled leap on-chain
It would be easy to read Nium's Cypher acquisition as an escape from the licensing grind that defines Wise's strategy. It isn't. The regulatory environment is converging on both routes at once. The EBA has advised national authorities on the actions required as the transition period under its no-action letter — governing the interplay between PSD2 and MiCA — came to an end on 2 March 2026, while the European Parliament continues to advance the Payment Services Regulation. The direction of travel is a staged move toward more unified payment services rules, with tightening enforcement along the way.
Translation: stablecoin-enabled settlement does not exempt anyone from the compliance perimeter — it pulls crypto-adjacent flows further inside it. Whether you build direct rails the Wise way or acquire on-chain capability the Nium way, the licence stack is the