EXCLUSIVE: “Making Local Global” – Alexandra Johnson, Nium in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

A new licence in Brazil has strengthened Nium’s position as one of the most comprehensive infrastructure services powering cross-border payments

When Nium was granted its licence to operate as a payment institution in Brazil, it was a milestone that followed years of work in the country. The authorisation by the Central Bank of Brazil in October 2025 means Nium can now onboard and serve its Brazilian customers directly, alongside its partnerships with intermediaries. The move underlines the firm’s unwavering commitment to a region that is witnessing a huge shift from cash to real-time digital payments through national systems such as Pix, QR codes and Boleto barcode payments, which provide financial inclusion for the unbanked.

But Nium’s global success hasn’t just been based on chasing what’s new. It has taken a pragmatic approach to build a network for cross-border payments using whatever works – witnessed in late 2024 when it leveraged Swift messaging as a method for banks to connect with its system.

“I call us a real-time payments infrastructure, not a payments company – I don’t even like to refer to us as a PSP [payment services provider],” says Nium Chief Payments Officer Alexandra Johnson. “We are that interoperable infrastructure to move money in real time securely, quickly, seamlessly. And for us to do that, we need the tech and regulatory infrastructure to be able to support any payment method that comes to the fore – be that stablecoins, the real-time payment schemes we’re already connected to, or whatever the future may bring.”

Nium was founded in Singapore in 2014 to create a fast and transparent alternative to the correspondent banking system. Initially with a focus on the travel industry, which still makes up a significant proportion of its clients, it’s now a £50billion company operating a cross-border payments platform with users in banking, payroll, other platforms and marketplaces. And it offers them complete spend management solutions, virtual cards, and white-label payout systems.

Today, it describes itself as ‘the global infrastructure for real-time payments’, coverhttps://www.nium.com/ing 190 countries and territories, around 100 real-time markets, and is regulated in 35 countries. Nium’s network has been constructed by creating links with national payment systems that were built for specific use cases but which didn’t interconnect.

In this way, it acts as a bridge between markets, but also between old and new. In many cases, it leverages old infrastructure, sometimes decades-old, and innovates on top of that to facilitate real-time money flows with visibility for sender and receiver.

Brazil beckons

Latin America was a natural destination for Nium, given the efforts of governments in the region to shrink the shadow economy through financial digitisation. The launch in October of Colombia’s low-value, real-time payments rail Bre-B follows the success of Pix in Brazil and Mexico’s SPEI and CoDi systems for moving funds between bank accounts. The speed and low cost of these systems support the growth of e-commerce and gig platforms, which typically operate on low margins.

“Nearly all financial institutions are already connected to Swift… so, banks send us that Swift message just as if they’re sending a wire, and we map that to the local payment scheme”

Nium already had a presence in Brazil through clients who use its rails to move money across borders. Many operated in the foreign exchange space. They include Oz Cambio, which offers a cross-border platform aimed at SMEs to facilitate import-export operations (typically Brazilian importers doing business with Chinese sellers), payment for workers such as IT staff employed from abroad, and companies with international payrolls. Frustrated by the costs and speed of existing systems, Oz partnered with Nium in 2023, and it now offers a white-label, cross-border mass payments platform.

Using Nium’s rails, Oz can settle payments in Brazil using methods such as Pix, the TED system for high-value payments, credit/debit cards or Boleto. Meanwhile, Frente Corretora de Câmbio joined forces with Nium because the fintech was one of the few companies in 2019 that could integrate with the RippleNet blockchain system – a method of moving money that appealed to many of Frente’s influencer, investment broker and travel agency clients.

Foreign exchange broker Treviso used Nium to scale its business via the use of digital services and now offers current account credit, using local corridors as a means of payment. Nium says winning a licence to operate in Brazil will ‘streamline operations’ and ‘reduces reliance on intermediaries, offering greater efficiency in the market’. It is also seeking a foreign exchange licence to strengthen its position in a country that Nium CEO Prajit Nanu describes as ‘not just a market for us… it’s a critical node in our global infrastructure, a strategic hub for our growth’.

Beyond Latin America, Nium achieved a major business win in September when it announced a deal to connect Singapore-based global bank DBS to its cross-border payment platform via Swift.

A Swift victory

Nium developed the Swift solution after recognising that financial institutions would be attracted to a system that leveraged the Swift  messaging protocol they had already adopted.

Johnson says: “Nearly all financial institutions are already connected to Swift, so in our minds, we want to meet our customers where they are. I am a former banker, so I can tell you firsthand that getting the resources prioritised to integrate with a new partner takes time just to get to a roadmap.

“So, banks use their existing connections and get access to the real-time seamless rails that we have connectivity to. They send us that Swift message just as if they’re sending a wire, and we map that to the formatting of the local payment scheme, which is real-time payments in several markets. It allows our customers better, faster access to these tools while they figure out where they are on their API journey.”

Adding value

Johnson adds that a focus on value-added services is another cornerstone of Nium’s competitive advantage, as it builds its globe-spanning, cross-border payment platform. Fraud protection is a key area, and the firm last year launched Nium Verify, whereby the identity of the account receiving payment can be verified in real time in 50 markets.

Worldpay is among Nium’s clients and chose to use Nium as it is ‘one of the only solutions on the market that allows us to verify account ownership in real-time across multiple markets, saving us costs associated with reconciling misdirected payments’.

Johnson says: “You can be absolutely certain about who you’re sending [the payment] to, but now we’re thinking about how we continue to evolve that. What are the other behavioural nodes, behavioural markers that we can look at within a transaction, or within the activity on an account?

“We’re at this inflection point. It’s not just about the payment anymore. And it’s not just about the last mile. Value-added services become key in creating a pleasing, customer-facing, end-to-end payment experience. It’s making sure you have strong compliance tools that end up being a moat for your business.

“It means fraud prevention tools, foreign exchange. All of these components are coming together in an integrated, singular payment solution.”

Johnson says the business acts as an aggregator for its customers. And she foresees that this aggregation, with the continued development of tech and regulatory infrastructure, will enable Nium to stay ahead of its competition.

She says: “The way we operate is to create a system we can continue to build upon to create that global interoperability as more of these efficient payment mechanisms come into the ecosystem.

“We don’t see this as something that will disrupt our business; if anything, it will bolster our business.

“It’s not just the integration of different payment mechanisms, but bringing together all the different capabilities involved in a payment: the pay-in, the data, compliance, and so on. And then look at the new payment types as they emerge – real-time payments, wallets, stablecoins, agentic payments, and whatever comes next.

“Working with partners, as in the case involving Swift, means we’re ready to create that interoperable system, be at the forefront of new payment capabilities and be ready when our customers need them.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #37, Page 19-20