Nuvei is buying Payoneer for $2.75bn, a bet that the way to take on Stripe is to own every step of a payment, not just one.
The Canadian firm will pay $7.40 a share in cash for Payoneer, the cross-border specialist listed on Nasdaq, in a deal both boards have approved. It ends Payoneer’s roughly five-year run as a public company.
Combined, the two say they will generate around $3bn in annual revenue, move more than $500bn a year, and serve over 2.4 million customers across 190-odd countries.
Two halves of a payment
The logic is that the companies barely overlap. Nuvei handles the merchant side, letting businesses accept cards and local payment methods. Payoneer handles the other end, paying out to freelancers, sellers and small firms, and is a fixture for people earning on Amazon, Etsy, Fiverr and Upwork.
Stitched together, Nuvei argues, they let a business accept, hold and move money, plus issue cards and manage currency, through one provider. ‘The acquisition of Payoneer marks a defining step in Nuvei’s evolution into a global financial infrastructure leader,’ said chief executive Phil Fayer.
The real prize may be paperwork. Payoneer holds hard-won licences in awkward markets, including online-payments clearance in mainland China and approval in principle as a cross-border aggregator in India. Those take years to earn, and money cannot easily buy them.
Aiming at Stripe and Adyen
The target is the top of the payments market. Stripe was last valued at $91.5bn, Adyen processes for the likes of Uber and Spotify, and Australia’s Airwallex recently raised $300m at more than $6bn, all selling the same one-stop pitch.
The deal also leans into where payments are heading: stablecoins and ‘agentic commerce’, where AI agents move money on your behalf. They are the same rails Robinhood is wiring up for AI agents, that Mastercard just paid up to $1.8bn for BVNK to reach, and that drove Stripe’s own stablecoin buying spree.
A long, leveraged road
The framing of out-muscling Stripe is ambitious. Combined revenue of about $3bn is a fraction of Stripe’s payment volume, and this is consolidation, not reinvention.
It is also a private-equity play. Nuvei itself was taken private by Advent International in a $6.3bn deal in 2024, and this all-cash purchase, backed by five banks’ financing, is its first big move since. Payoneer’s investors, who have watched the stock struggle since its 2021 listing, get a clean cash exit.
None of it lands soon. The deal is not expected to close until mid-2027, pending Payoneer shareholder and regulatory approvals, with those China and India licences likely to draw the closest scrutiny.
