The cross-border payment industry is undergoing a structural adjustment rather than a periodic fluctuation.
Nuvei acquired Payne, whose net profit fell 40% for US$2.75 billion. The most eye-catching data on this “test sheet” is not the acquisition amount, but that Payne’s revenue in 2025 will be US$1.053 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8%, but the net profit will plummet 40% year-on-year to US$73.2 million.
Increasing revenue without increasing profits is a typical symptom of the industry’s disease – when the extensive growth dividend of the “channel spread” peaks, the days when you can live well by eating the interest differential are gone forever.
Why would a company with an annual revenue of more than 1 billion “sell” itself?
Pay Anying is not a bad asset that no one wants. It holds a lot of high-quality cards: a B2B lending network that serves Amazon, Walmart, eBay and other platforms. In the first quarter of 2026, its revenue in Greater China reached US$87 million, and its B2B business transaction volume increased by 44% year-on-year.
But it also has a fatal shortcoming – it has only been engaged in “lending” for a long time and lacks front-end acquiring capabilities.
In the cross-border payment industry, 72% of merchants lose consumers due to high payment failure rates.
A platform that can only help sellers collect money, but cannot allow consumers to pay smoothly, naturally has gaps in customer experience.
What’s even more fatal is that Payne’s profit model is highly dependent on interest income.
As soon as the global interest rate cut cycle comes in 2024-2025, the income of the capital pool has shrunk significantly. Combined with the compliance costs of acquiring Yilian Pay to obtain a Chinese license and the huge investment in AI technology transformation, net profits have been directly cut in half.
The external cause is the reversal of the interest rate environment and tightening supervision (such as the new PSD3 regulations), but the internal cause is more critical – Payne’s business structure itself is walking on one leg.
Nuvei’s judgment is very clear: Buying PC Anying is not to buy its past, but to buy its strategic value to make up for Nuvei’s shortcomings.
What did you buy in this transaction?
Nuvei is a front-end acquiring giant, serving leading cross-border e-commerce companies such as Temu and Shein. It supports more than 720 payment methods and has local acquiring capabilities in 50 markets.
But it lacks a back-end lending network, especially in the Chinese market.
Pay Anying just makes up for these two areas – it has a B2B fund distribution network covering global sellers, as well as a Chinese payment license obtained through the acquisition of Yilian Pay.
Nuvei CEO Phil Fayer made it clear that after integration, a complete platform covering “receipts, payments, card issuance, fund management and foreign exchange” will be formed.
This is not a simple 1 + 1.
A cross-border e-commerce seller used to have to contact Nuvei for acquiring orders, then contact Payanying for lending, and then find a third party to manage foreign exchange. Now, one platform can handle it all.
Industry data shows that the customer retention rate of single-channel service providers is 62% lower than that of full-link service providers.
Full-link closed loop is the hard threshold for retaining customers and increasing profits.
The combined company’s annual revenue is expected to reach US$3 billion, its annual payment processing volume exceeds US$500 billion, and it serves 2.4 million+ customers.
But this scale itself is not a moat. The real barrier is: when customers are bound to a platform that can solve all payment problems, it is difficult for them to leave.
This acquisition is a landmark event as the cross-border payment industry enters a period of “dismantling and reconstruction”.
SWIFT’s share of global cross-border payment transaction volume has dropped from 80% in 2019 to 62% in 2025.
The traditional system is loosening and new forces are rising – stablecoins have compressed cross-border transaction nodes from 5-7 to 2, and AI agents can enable point-to-point transactions to be completed in as fast as 1 second.
Technology is rewriting the definition of payment efficiency from the ground up.
So, what is the prognosis grade for this industry?
Leading institutions such as Nuvei + Pian Ying, Adyen, and Stripe are building full-link capabilities through mergers and acquisitions. Their window period is still 3 to 5 years to digest integration and verify synergy effects.
There are two paths for small and medium-sized institutions.
One is vertical cultivation. For example, XTransfer focuses on small and medium-sized foreign trade companies. The transaction volume will exceed US$60 billion in 2025, and the gross profit margin has exceeded 90% for three consecutive years.
The other one is integrated, such as Yellow Card in Africa, which relies on stablecoins to develop in more than 20 countries, with a cumulative transaction volume of more than 3 billion US dollars.
The prospects for the remaining “channel-type” institutions that have neither core scenarios nor scale advantages are “irreversible elimination.”
When compliance costs, AI R&D investment, and full-link capability building become barriers to entry, the game of relying solely on price differences is coming to an end.
