Nium Debuts USDC Funding for Client Payouts

Cross-border payments company Nium has debuted a stablecoin-focused funding program.

USDC funding lets businesses finance their Nium accounts with the USDC stablecoin and pay out in fiat, thus extending the company’s payout network to businesses holding stablecoins, the company announced Thursday (Aug. 27).

“For years, moving money across borders has meant a familiar trade-off: prefund accounts in every market you operate in, or accept the delays of correspondent banking,” the announcement said.

“Capital sits idle in nostro accounts for days at a time, waiting to be paid out. Businesses that already hold stablecoins have faced a separate problem: no clean way to convert those balances into usable funds that can be used in the everyday economy.”

Nium says its new offering addresses both issues. Businesses deposit USDC into their accounts with Nium, where the funds are converted into U.S. dollars and automatically credited and ready for payout via the same payment infrastructure Nium clients already use, with no crypto platforms in play or any digital assets to manage.

“Every business we talk to is sitting on the same problem in a different wrapper — they either have capital trapped in prefunded accounts or stablecoin balances with nowhere useful to go,” said Kuberan Marimuthu, vice president of digital assets at Nium. “Our USDC funding solves both at once. We put idle money, whether it is fiat or stablecoin, to work and we do it on the same robust infrastructure businesses already trust.”

The release added that this launch expands on Nium’s larger digital asset strategy, coming in the wake of the company’s March announcement that it had debuted a platform for stablecoin-backed card issuance.

USDC funding is available now to Nium’s eligible corporate clients, with  no new integration for the company’s existing customers, the release added.

“Businesses have been told to choose between the speed of stablecoins and the reach of traditional rails,” said Marimuthu. “We’re proving that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. With Nium stablecoin funding, our customers are getting the best of both worlds.”

PYMNTS spoke last month with Prajit Nanu, Nium’s founder and CEO, who compared stablecoins to a drug trying to treat 20 different problems.

And while the technology lands a few real use cases, Nanu said the one he is banking on has nothing to do with consumer payments.

“Where we see a significant amount of opportunity is stablecoin not as a payments value, but as a settlement value,” he told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “Where we think stablecoin has the biggest value is as a treasury layer across all the entities, where I can move money instantly among my entities.”