Nium and small-business banking platform Relay have processed more than $500 million in cross-border payments since launching their partnership approximately one year ago, the companies announced at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas on 19 October 2026.
Nium’s infrastructure currently supports payments for more than 500 Relay customers, the majority of them small and medium-sized businesses, with reach into 153 countries. The partnership allows Relay customers to collect, convert, send and spend funds internationally, using Nium’s licensed payment rails.
The deal
Relay is a US-based digital banking platform for small businesses, built around cash-flow visibility and multi-account management. Rather than build proprietary cross-border infrastructure, it has chosen to embed Nium’s rails, allowing it to offer broad geographic coverage without the regulatory overhead of obtaining money-transmission licences across multiple jurisdictions itself.
Nium holds regulatory licences in more than 40 countries and operates a payout network across more than 190 markets, with over 100 settling in real time. It is a principal member of Visa, Mastercard, Discover and UATP card schemes. That regulatory footprint is a meaningful competitive asset in a space where coverage gaps and compliance failures have undermined otherwise capable cross-border products.
Anupam Pahuja, chief business officer at Nium, said: “Certainty is what businesses need from their business banking and payments partners, from the moment a customer is onboarded to the moment funds are delivered. Relay is giving its customers that certainty across 153 countries, and we are built to support it at every step.”
Yoseph West, CEO and co-founder at Relay, described the requirement for a technology partner that could match Relay’s pace through modern APIs and close collaboration. The partnership is positioned as one that will expand further as demand among Relay’s customer base grows.
Market context
The SME cross-border payments segment is one of the more contested corners of the paytech landscape. Established providers including Wise Business, Airwallex and Payoneer compete directly for the same customer profile: small businesses paying overseas suppliers, freelancers and contractors. What differentiates these providers increasingly comes down to three things: the depth of local payout networks, onboarding speed, and transparency of FX pricing at the point of payment initiation.
The $500 million figure represents cumulative volume across the partnership’s first year, not a run-rate or annual figure, and the release does not disclose average transaction size, take rate or revenue contribution to either party. For Nium, which is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore and has raised significant venture capital over several rounds, Relay sits within a broader strategy of powering embedded cross-border payments for fintechs and neobanks rather than competing at the merchant or SME level directly.
The broader regulatory environment is also relevant here. In the United States, state-level money-transmission licensing remains a structural barrier for smaller cross-border providers, which reinforces the commercial logic of banking-as-a-service models in which a single licensed infrastructure layer like Nium services multiple front-end products. Relay itself is not an FDIC-insured bank; its banking services are provided by Thread Bank, a licensed depository institution. That structure is typical among US fintech platforms and signals the layered compliance architecture underpinning even straightforward-looking SME banking products.
The next milestones to watch include whether Nium and Relay expand their agreement to cover Relay Capital products, which are currently listed separately, and whether the geographic scope moves beyond the existing 153-country footprint.
AI level 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, structure or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
