Nium Rolls Out Platform for Issuing Stablecoin Cards

Cross-border payments/card issuance company Nium has launched its stablecoin card issuance platform.

The solution is designed to let companies holding stablecoins issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration, Nium said in a Monday (March 30) news release.

This allows the coins to be used at hundreds of millions of merchant locations worldwide at a time when stablecoins are becoming part of the financial infrastructure, the release added.

“With regulatory frameworks advancing in the US, EU, and across Asia Pacific, and an estimated $200 billion in stablecoins now in circulation, enterprises are no longer asking whether to hold digital dollars – they are asking how to put them to work,” Nium said.

“Designed to be complementary to existing systems, Nium’s platform extends the utility of stablecoins by connecting them to established payments network infrastructure – bringing the acceptance, reliability, and safeguards that businesses and consumers already trust.”

The company added that the offering is designed to allow stablecoin settlement options where supported, while letting companies deploy stablecoin balances through cards and payouts without maintaining separate provider relationships.

In other stablecoin news, recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that businesses that wish to use stablecoins are more interested in joining forces with banks than with crypto wallets.

Those wallets, while efficient, “introduce unfamiliar risks: private key management, fragmented reporting, uncertain custody standards and evolving regulatory interpretations,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month. “Banks, by contrast, provide a trust layer that CFOs already understand.”

More recently, PYMNTS examined stablecoins changing role inside corporate finance departments, with research from the report “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins” showing that 88% of companies that receive stablecoins convert them into U.S. dollars immediately.

“The implication is both subtle and profound, showing how for most chief financial officers, stablecoins are not being treated as a store of value, but as a faster, more efficient payment rail,” PYMNTS wrote.

“This distinction may help reframe stablecoins from a crypto-native asset class into a piece of financial infrastructure that is closer in spirit to Swift or ACH than to treasury holdings.”

And it could help explain why, despite years of hype and billions of dollars in market capitalization, stablecoin adoption within the business world is still “cautious, selective and highly pragmatic,” the report added.