Cross-border payments are having a moment, and today we're going deeper into the topic than Kaupr ever has before — from Nuvei's $2.75 billion bet on owning the full payments stack to China's push to settle trade outside SWIFT, with stablecoins and tokenized deposits running through nearly every story. Sweden sits right in the middle of it, while Europe's tech-sovereignty debate and a ticking MiCA clock round out the picture.

Some of the stories in today's newsletter:

♦️ Nuvei buys Payoneer for $2.75 billion to own the full cross-border payments stack. ♦️ Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase are quietly backing a stablecoin alliance — and it could matter more than any single token.
♦️ China upgrades the digital yuan and builds settlement rails designed to bypass SWIFT entirely.
♦️ Sweden is a payments crossroads: Centiglobe expands into Latin America, AllUnity launches its krona stablecoin in Stockholm.
♦️ Goobit's MiCA licence — now comes down to two weeks.

Have a great read!

Morten

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Nuvei is acquiring Payoneer for $2.75 billion, combining payment acceptance with Payoneer's cross-border payouts, multi-currency accounts and banking connections across more than 150 markets. The combined company expects to generate roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and serve platforms including Amazon, Airbnb, Shopify and Etsy. Nuvei says the deal also strengthens its stablecoin and agentic-commerce capabilities.

Why it matters: A $2.75 billion bet that owning the full cross-border stack — acceptance plus payout plus regulatory licences — beats specializing in one piece of it, at a moment when stablecoins are being positioned as critical infrastructure for the same market.

Source: Nuvei buys Payoneer to capture growth in cross-border payments — Kaupr

Asia-Pacific cross-border payment flows are projected to roughly double by 2032, while the correspondent-banking infrastructure carrying them was built for a smaller, slower era and is already straining under today's volume. A typical cross-border payment can still take several days and cost far more than a domestic one, since it threads through multiple intermediary banks with limited hours and trapped liquidity.

Why it matters: Asia is set to handle a growing share of the world's cross-border flows just as the same friction points — failed payments, idle pre-funded capital, repeated compliance checks — scale with the volume. It's the structural backdrop both Nuvei and the Centiglobe/Bamboo deal below are betting against.

Source: Asia's Cross-Border Payments Will Near $24 Trillion By 2032. The Rails Are Not Ready — Forbes

Stripe, Visa and Mastercard are backing a soon-to-launch stablecoin platform, with Coinbase weighing involvement — a potential common framework for routing digital currency that could challenge Circle and Tether's grip on stablecoin infrastructure. The analysis argues this shifts the competitive question from "which token" to "who controls the rails," making a stablecoin strategy a deliberate choice for banks rather than something to defer.

Why it matters: This is the infrastructure layer underpinning everything else in this block — owning routing, settlement and compliance may matter more than owning the token itself.

Source: Why Banks Should Pay Attention to a Visa-Mastercard-Stripe-Coinbase Stablecoin Alliance — Finovate

China's central bank is upgrading the e-CNY into an interest-bearing instrument and expanding cross-border settlement through Project mBridge — explicitly designed to route around SWIFT. The push follows the 2022 freeze of roughly $300 billion in Russian reserves, which pushed several countries to hedge against dollar-system dependence. The renminbi still faces real constraints: capital controls and shallow bond markets limit how far this can go.

Why it matters: The one player here not trying to fix the existing rails, but build an alternative to them entirely — a useful counterpoint to the private-sector plays elsewhere in this block.

Source: China develops digital payments system to challenge US dollar dominance — Crypto Briefing

Swedish payment network Centiglobe, built on tokenized bank deposits, is partnering with Latin American infrastructure provider Bamboo, giving its network members access to Bamboo's banking and payment connections across the region — more than 200 payment methods and 600+ banks — without needing local entities. A survey from FinanceX Magazine and Centiglobe found 77% of payments executives are open to tokenized deposits, but 65% cite regulatory uncertainty as the biggest barrier.

Why it matters: A concrete example of Nordic payments infrastructure expanding outward rather than just receiving foreign players — and a real-money signal that institutions want regulated tokenized rails, not just faster card networks.

Source: Swedish Centiglobe expands into Latin America with Bamboo — Kaupr

AllUnity CEO Alexander Höptner told Kaupr that Sweden's deep European integration and tech-savvy corporate base made it the natural first Nordic market for SEKAU, the company's krona-pegged stablecoin — with five to six more currencies, including the dollar, planned after summer. AllUnity launched in Sweden with an event in Stockholm Monday afternoon.

Why it matters: Höptner draws a sharp line between stablecoins and crypto assets — positioning SEKAU as payment infrastructure for European corporates, not a speculative instrument — a framing increasingly relevant as more Nordic currencies enter the stablecoin race.

Source: "Sweden the perfect starting point for a Nordic stablecoin" — Kaupr

Swedish-listed Goobit Group reports net revenue down to SEK 24.3 million (from SEK 63.9 million a year earlier) and an operating loss of SEK 13.1 million, while its MiCA licence application remains under review with Sweden's FSA. The revenue drop partly reflects a change in accounting for OTC trades; two impairments (SEK 4.5M and SEK 4.6M) also weighed on the result. CEO Christian Ander is pursuing a parallel M&A strategy to consolidate the Nordic crypto market ahead of MiCA.

Why it matters: Goobit's licence and its consolidation bet are both racing the same 30 June MiCA deadline — a concrete test case for how Nordic crypto firms cope with the new regime while several competitors have already secured approval.

Source: Goobit awaits MiCA approval as losses widen — Kaupr

In a Guardian opinion piece, Max von Thun argues that while Brussels is moving to reduce dependence on US tech giants — including a new package covering chips, cloud and AI — true digital sovereignty requires more than owning or controlling infrastructure. He argues Europe also needs an independent vision for how technology itself gets designed and deployed, rather than simply building local alternatives within the same Silicon Valley logic.

Why it matters: As the EU pushes ahead with its own chips, cloud and AI sovereignty package, the piece raises a sharper question for onchain finance too — whether building European alternatives to US-dominated crypto and stablecoin infrastructure actually changes anything if the underlying assumptions and incentives stay American.

Source: Europe is starting to break up with US big tech. But it's still abiding by the Silicon Valley rulebook — The Guardian (Max von Thun)

A Wired analysis tracked dozens of documented cases of European governments, companies and institutions moving away from US Big Tech — from the International Criminal Court abandoning Microsoft after US sanctions against its officials, to agencies and a Belgian domain registry shifting away from AWS. The piece traces the acceleration to fallout from the Trump administration's actions and broader concerns over the US CLOUD Act, FISA access, and vendor lock-in.

Why it matters: Each instance is small, but cumulatively this is the concrete, on-the-ground version of the sovereignty debate von Thun writes about above — and the same logic increasingly applies to European banks and payment firms weighing dollar-stablecoin dependence versus building their own rails.

Source: All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology — Wired

Thank you for reading Kaupr Today. If you find this briefing useful, please share it with a colleague or friend who should be following Nordic and European digital‑finance news more closely.

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Wishing you a great Tuesday — and welcome back tomorrow morning for the next edition of Kaupr Today.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor