The cross-border payment industry is undergoing a competitive shift from “channel price difference” to “full-link closed loop”. Nuvei acquired Payne, whose net profit plummeted by 40%, for US$2.75 billion. This incident has become a significant symbol of changes in the industry’s competitive landscape.
First of all, let’s look at the current situation of Payne. Its revenue in 2025 is US$1.05 billion, a year-on-year increase of only 8%, and its net profit is only
73.2 million U.S. dollars, a 40% drop, far below the industry’s “Rule of 40” (sum of revenue growth + profit margin > 40%) by 15%.
During the same period, Stripe’s annual payment processing volume was US$19 trillion, and PayPal’s annual processing volume was close to US$1.8 trillion. Together, the two accounted for nearly 45% of the non-bank cross-border payment market.
Anying, a medium-sized platform, is in a situation of pressure from both sides. The upper side cannot compete with the scale, while the lower side is cannibalized by vertical subdivision.
Paanying faces difficulties due to both external and internal reasons.
From the outside, supervision and technology have become two sharp swords.
In terms of supervision, strong regulatory policies such as the EU PSD3 have tightened anti-money laundering and customer identity verification requirements. Global compliance approvals are fragmented, and small and medium-sized platforms simply cannot cover the high compliance investment.
In terms of technology, stablecoins compress the cross-border transaction path from the traditional 5-7 nodes to 2 nodes, and AI automatic reconciliation shortens days of work to minutes.
The proportion of the traditional SWIFT system in the total global cross-border payment transaction volume has dropped from more than 80% in 2019 to 62% in 2025, and the profit margin of channel price differences has been completely flattened.
The problems of Pay Anying are not all external, but more internal.
For a long time, it has only been a back-end lending side, lacking the front-end acquiring side.
Customer needs have been upgraded from “being able to collect money” to integrating acquiring, settlement, lending, and fund management.
Data shows that 72% of merchants report that the payment failure rate for cross-border transactions is higher than that for local transactions, and 94% of consumers want to use local currency for settlement.
The customer retention rate of single-channel service providers is 62% lower than that of full-link service providers. This is the structural flaw behind the sale of PCA.
Look at Nuvei’s chain link logic again.
Nuvei is good at front-end acquiring, serving large platforms such as Temu and Shein; Paianying is deeply involved in back-end B2B lending, covering 2 million + small and medium-sized sellers, and will obtain a domestic payment license in China through the acquisition of Yilian Pay in 2025.
After the merger of the two, the annual revenue reaches 3 billion US dollars and the annual payment processing volume exceeds 500 billion US dollars, directly forming a complete closed loop of “receipt – payment – card issuance – fund management”.
This is not a simple superposition of scale, but a manifestation of the new rules of the industry – whoever makes up for the shortcomings first will be qualified to stay at the poker table.
For medium-sized payment institutions, there are only two ways out: one is to join the first echelon through large-scale mergers and acquisitions like Nuvei + Payne; the other is to focus on vertical segmentation like XTransfer and deeply cultivate small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises. In 2025, the transaction volume will exceed 60.5 billion US dollars, and the gross profit margin will remain above 90% for three consecutive years.
Those platforms that have neither full-link capabilities nor scenario barriers will continue to be eliminated in this round of eliminations.
The cross-border payment industry has bid farewell to extensive growth.
Compliance costs, technological changes, and demand upgrades are three major issues that have turned the threshold of the industry’s right to survival into three words: “full link.”
This acquisition is not the end, but a signal that the industry reshuffle has entered an acceleration period.
