The payments company Nium has made a business in cross-border payments, fittingly from its dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco. It has also created a platform for card issuing that reaches across boundaries.

In March, the company fortified its business for the advance of cryptocurrencies by adding more stablecoin services, allowing its financial institution, corporate and fintech clients that hold stablecoins to issue cards on the Visa and Mastercard networks. That allows the card holders to spend the cryptocurrency at merchants worldwide.

This month, the company took another step in that direction by buying the cryptocurrency digital wallet business Cypher (financial details weren’t released). While Nium already supported funding and settlement of stablecoins, the acquisition will let it further develop crypto services in the blockchain ecosystem for digital transactions.

In an interview last week, Nium CEO Prajit Nanu talked about the company’s acquisition, growth plans and stablecoin strategy. The company has raised $339 million to pursue its goals.

PAYMENTS DIVE: Why did Nium buy Cypher?

PRAJIT NANU: Digital assets [have] gotten a big push recently, thanks to stablecoins becoming a thing. If you think about the Genius Act, which came in place like a year ago, [it] made stablecoins a legit use case. We see a significant aspect of usage in stablecoins. I believe a lot of countries where traditional finance has had difficulty in penetration, they [will] have more people coming on chain or and experiencing finance, versus traditional finance…So, we bought a consumer company which has significant understanding of how this works, and our intention is that we will relabel this consumer company, make it into [application programming interfaces], so anyone can launch a massive infrastructure [for] on-chain financial services using our infrastructure.

Who are your corporate customers, aside from banks?

It could be international conglomerates trying to pay employees. It could be international companies with multiple entities across the globe where they need the treasury movement to happen. It could be payroll companies, [or] marketplaces like e-commerce companies.

That business-to-business arena is fairly competitive. How fierce do you find those rivalries?

We believe we have a right to win in this space, like we don't spray and pray. It's just very sticky, and that's what our strength is. That's why some of the largest banks in the world work with us to build this out because their view is very simple that they need one platform which they can trust as they scale and grow. That's where our strength has been. We're very, very focused. We don't get distracted. We don't do any acquiring – a lot of our peers are veering into card acquiring. We don't do any card acquiring. Our focus is on a more efficient way to move money on the bank networks.

Does Nium see promise in using real-time payments, such as the Federal Reserve’s instant payments system FedNow, which is piloting features that could support cross-border?

There's a massive opportunity. Payments today [need] to be instant, right? Like if I send money from Europe to the U.K., or from the U.K. to Singapore, money arrives instantly because there's an instant switch on both sides where you can accept and basically pull money instantly. So, I think it's time that that transformation does come to the U.S.

Do you have more acquisitions and mergers planned?

M & A is a core part of what we do. This is our fourth acquisition. We believe we have a good book of companies we want to buy. We know exactly what we want to buy…So, we believe that there is more consolidation possible in this market.

Which companies are you targeting?

We are very strong in Asia, Europe and the U.S. So, Latin America and Africa are two places where we are not really strong. So those are places where we’ll double down, and figure out assets to basically buy.