“The future is programmatic money movement” – Nium’s Prajit Nanu

Nium, which provides a global infrastructure for real-time cross-border payments and card issuance, has launched its stablecoin card issuance platform.  The solution enables companies holding stablecoins to issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration, allowing stablecoins to be used at hundreds of millions of merchant locations globally.

In this interview with The Digital Banker, Prajit Nanu, founder and CEO of Nium, discusses the firm’s latest move, as well as what the future of money movement looks like.

Shruti Khairnar, The Digital Banker: Nium’s announcement about stablecoin card issuance with two major networks is a big step — what problem does it solve right now for cross-border payments?

Prajit Nanu, CEO & founder, Nium: The problem was never stablecoins themselves — it was always the infrastructure around them. Exchange-to-exchange movement is instant, but the moment you need to collect from a local payment system or pay out into a local bank account, that’s where time and cost get added back in. Stablecoins sitting in a wallet aren’t useful unless you can actually spend them. We’ve spoken to businesses across exchanges, fintechs, and marketplaces — and they all say the same thing: their users hold stablecoins but have no simple way to use them.

What we’ve built solves both sides of that problem. Nium’s real-time rails handle the on-ramp and off-ramp. And we connect stablecoin wallets directly to cards that work across hundreds of million merchants so people can pay for their flights, groceries, and bills wherever Visa and Mastercard cards are accepted. We handle conversion and settlement in real time. The merchant gets paid in local currency. Nothing changes at checkout. But for the user, everything changes.

Stablecoin payments have had false starts before. What has changed to make real-world adoption finally work?

The short answer is that the conditions have finally converged. For a long time, the biggest barrier wasn’t technology — it was uncertainty. Enterprises weren’t going to commit to stablecoin infrastructure while the regulatory ground was still shifting beneath them. That’s changed. The EU’s MiCA framework is live, the US is moving toward federal legislation, and APAC markets are establishing clear rules. When a CFO can point to a compliance framework, the conversation moves from “should we?” to “how fast can we move?”

But the deeper shift is infrastructure. Over the last decade we’ve seen a lot of innovation in money movement, but much of it still depended on pre-funded balances sitting in different countries. Stablecoins change that. They allow value to move globally in real time without the same capital inefficiencies. The question was always whether the infrastructure around them could catch up. The on-ramp and off-ramp problem is being solved. The spending problem is now solved. The pieces are in place in a way they simply weren’t even two years ago.

How do you see programmable money and AI shaping the future of payments over the next few years?

Companies are going to have to think about this very transformatively. Stablecoins, AI, programmable money — you can’t treat these as an outside layer bolted onto how you already operate. If AI is sitting on the edge of your payments stack and stablecoins are an afterthought, it’s not going to work. These things have to be deep in the fabric of how you move money.

The future is programmatic money movement: value that flows seamlessly, interconnected, with intelligence built in. It could be stablecoins, it could be fiat, it could be other forms of value. What matters is connectivity because the future is multi-rail. What we’re building toward is a world where capital moves instantly to wherever it needs to be, on the optimal rail, without friction and without human intervention at every step. The companies that embed this thinking now — rather than treating it as a future problem — will be the ones that come out ahead.

As adoption grows, how do you expect regulation around stablecoins to evolve?

Regulation typically follows adoption, and adoption of stablecoins is moving fast. Stablecoin circulating supply has gone from $30 billion in 2020 to now over $300B according to McKinsey & Co. The direction is clear – we’re going from ambiguity toward structured frameworks, and that’s the right move. Clarity is what enterprises need to commit. The EU’s MiCA framework is the current benchmark. The US is catching up. Asia Pacific is moving. Over the next two to three years, I expect convergence around reserve requirements, issuance standards, and cross-border interoperability rules.

For infrastructure providers, the question is whether you’re already inside those frameworks or scrambling to catch up as they take shape. At Nium, we intentionally chose to hold our own regulatory licenses in 40+ countries, with more to come. That’s not just a compliance advantage; it’s a business advantage. The players closest to local rails and local regulation will have better economics, better scale, and more durable businesses than those building on top of intermediaries.

If stablecoins become a key settlement tool in volatile currency corridors, how will that change global payments and banking?

It will fundamentally change who has the advantage in cross-border payments. Correspondent banking has dominated volatile currency corridors because there’s been no credible, compliant alternative for settlement. Stablecoins change that equation. A business moving money through an illiquid or volatile currency corridor no longer has to absorb the spread, the delay, and the opacity of a multi-hop chain. Settle in a stable digital currency, convert at the endpoint, move on.

The bigger question is what this means for banks. The honest reality is that building the infrastructure to compete in a stablecoin-native payments world takes years — licenses across dozens of jurisdictions, direct connectivity to local rails, card network relationships, real-time settlement capability. Most banks can’t build that fast enough to stay ahead of where the market is moving. The ones that will win aren’t necessarily the ones that build it themselves — they’re the ones that are smart enough to partner with infrastructure providers that already have it built. That’s exactly the conversation we’re having with banks today. They’re not asking whether stablecoins will matter in these corridors. They’re asking how quickly they can plug into the right rails and bring that capability to their customers without starting from scratch.

And the urgency is real. Fintechs and neobanks are already eroding bank market share in cross-border payments — faster onboarding, lower fees, better user experience. Stablecoins accelerate that trend. Banks that treat this as a future problem will find themselves displaced not by some theoretical competitor, but by nimble fintechs that are already in market and moving faster. The window to act is open. It won’t stay open indefinitely.