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May 3, 2026
Kaupr Weekly — The payments stack is being rebuilt — 4 May 2026
Kaupr Weekly — The payments stack is being rebuilt — 4 May 2026
00:00
09:08
Transcript
0:00
Hi, and welcome to Köper Weekly. This is a new format. Every week, I'll talk about 10 minutes or so to share what I actually think mattered.
0:12
Not a list of stories, but the one thread I keep pulling on after a week of reading, curating, and talking to people in this space.
0:22
This week, that thread is payments, or more precisely, the moment we are, are in right now where the way money moves is being rebuilt from scratch. Let me explain what I mean.
0:36
I've been covering fintech and crypto for a while now, and one thing I've learned is that the really big shifts don't announce themselves loudly.
0:45
They happen in the background across many different companies in many different places, and then one week you look up and realize something has fundamentally changed. This was one of those weeks.
0:58
Western Union has been moving money around the world for 170 years. They started with the telegraph.
1:06
This week, their CEO confirmed they are launching a stablecoin on Solana in May and connecting it to their 360,000-agent cash pickup networks through a single API. Think about what that means.
1:24
A 170-year-old company is replacing its settlement infrastructure with a blockchain, not experimenting, not piloting, launching.
1:35
At the same time, Meta, the company that tried to launch its own currency four years ago with Libra and got stopped by half the world's regulators, quietly started paying creators in USDC stablecoins this week in Colombia and in the Philippines via Stripe.
1:56
No fanfare, no announcement, just a product. And Visa reported that its stablecoin settlement network has hit the seven billion annualized run rate, up 50% in a single quarter. Nine blockchains growing fast.
2:13
And then there was Stripe.
2:15
At their annual, uh, conference towards the end of the week, Stripe launched a range of new products spanning payments and what they're calling the agentic economy, tools that let agents, uh, initiate, manage, and settle transactions autonomously.
2:32
What's striking about Stripe is the same thing that's striking about Western Union, Meta, and Visa. This is not a crypto company.
2:40
Stripe is a payment infrastructure giant used by millions of businesses globally, and their entire strategy is built around abstracting away everything that looks or smells like crypto in the user interface.
2:54
The complexity, the wallet addresses, the volatility, while running stablecoins and blockchain rails underneath. The user experience is clean, familiar fintech. The infrastructure underneath is the future of money.
3:10
Now, here's what I found really interesting about all four of these, uh, stories. None of them are crypto companies. Western Union is a remittance giant. Meta is a social media company.
3:21
Visa is the world's largest payment network. And they're all making the same bet at the same time. Stablecoins are the settlement layer of the future. Then there was David Marcus.
3:34
If you don't know who David Marcus is, he built PayPal into what it became, then went to Meta and led Messenger with over a billion users, then launched Libra, which was supposed to be a global digital currency backed by a basket of assets, and the world shut it down.
3:53
Governments, central banks, regulators, everyone lined up against it. This week, he was back on stage at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, launching Grid Global Account, Lightspark's new platform for global payments.
4:10
Lightspark has been around for years as a Bitcoin and Lightning company, but Grid is something considerably broader, a single API connecting to local payment networks in 65 countries, supporting stablecoins, Visa cards, bank transfers, and Bitcoin, with a settlement layer invisible to the end user.
4:33
And the most forward-looking feature, AI agents with their own ring-fence payment accounts, spending limits, and audit trails. As Marcus put it, "The agent plans, the policy decides, and the account enforces."
4:50
So why does all of this matter so much right now? I think we're watching the moment where the plumbing of the global financial system starts to be replaced.
4:59
Not the products people see, the apps, the cards, the transfers, the infrastructure underneath, the settlement layer, the rails.
5:08
And stablecoins are winning that race, not because they're crypto, but because they are programmable. They settle in real time. They work 24/7, and they're borderless.
5:19
For a company like Western Union, that's just a better product. For a company like Meta, it means paying 3 billion people without rooting through 50 different banking systems.
5:31
Now let me bring this closer to home in the Nordics because this week the same conversation was happening right here in the Nordics, just in the different formats.
5:41
One week ago, we were on the ground at Nor- Norway Fintech Festival in Bergen. Crypto, stablecoins, and agentic AI took up more space on the program than ever before.
5:51
Um, and there was also people from Norges Bank and also from DNB on the panels.
5:57
Firi, K33, Revolut, uh, Klarna, all was there.The question being asked was no longer whether digital money has a future, it was what future looks like in practice. That's a shift.
6:11
Two days later, uh, also a week ago, we brought that conversation into our studio for Kaup TV live from Stockholm with guests from across the Nordic, uh, financial scene, and the future payment was right at the center of it.
6:25
And then there's Banking Circle.
6:27
If you haven't heard of them, you probably should because if you're a fintech company in the Nordics, there's a good chance you're already running on the infrastructure without knowing it.
6:38
Banking Circle started as an idea inside of Saxo Bank in Copenhagen back in 2013.
6:46
Today, they process over one trillion euros in payment volume annually and serve more than 700 financial institutions, including Stripe, Alibaba, and Paysafe.
6:58
They are what people in the industry calls layer zero, the invisible regulated backbone that fintech companies build on. Recently, Banking Circle received its crypto asset, uh, license under MiCA.
7:13
They now hold a banking license, an EMT money license, and a CUSP license under one roof in Luxembourg, the only operator in Europe to do so. And they launched regulated stablecoin to, uh, settlements.
7:28
Banking Circle has Nordic roots, born as an idea inside of Saxo Bank in Copenhagen. But today, it's the most fully licensed payment infrastructure provider in Europe.
7:39
Not long ago, at, uh, Treasury 360 Nordic in, uh, Gothenburg, around 1,000 Nordic treasurers gathered, and eight sessions on the program touched directly on digital assets, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits.
7:56
Danske Bank, Nordea, Socialden, BNP Paribas, and ING were all on stage. Not talking about crypto. No, talking about products they are building, or in the French case, already running in production.
8:15
Two years ago, this was future scenario talk. This year, it's operational workshop in a conference with, uh, custody people. The rails are ready.
8:27
The question is whether Nordic and Baltic companies are moving fast enough to use them. That's what I wanted to share this week. The future of payments isn't coming.
8:37
It's arrived in Las Vegas, in California, in Gothenburg, in Luxembourg, in Bergen. If you want to go deeper on any of these stories, they've all been covered in detail in Kaup Today. Links in the show notes.
8:51
And if you want to watch the conversation we had on Kaup TV on the 24th of April, that's also available. Link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
9:00
And if you found this useful, share it with someone who should be paying attention. That was a pundit.
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Episode 4: Stablecoins on a Nordic Agenda — Who Owns the Future of Payments?
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