Intro

Recently, we looked into Nium, a financial services company that “provides banks, payment providers, and businesses of any size with access to global payment and card issuance services.” Initially founded in 2014, Nium focuses specifically on global payments for businesses and claims to be “the world’s leading real-time payments infrastructure.”

Product

Nium offers services for pay-outs, pay-ins, card issuance, and banking-as-a-service. According to their website, with Nium:

• payments between businesses, businesses and customers, or peer to peer can be made to bank accounts, wallets, or cards
• you can access over 190 global markets
• 80% of payments sent through the network arrive in 15 minutes or less
• over $25B in funds are sent annually

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Creativity

Nium first launched in Australia, and after that India, Singapore, and Canada. This is intriguing since basically all the other payment processors originated in the U.S. We assume that since Nium started as a global company, it may have greater reach, compatibility, and transfer speed than some of the other options in this sector, especially for global businesses. 

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Website

Nium’s main website has a ton of information on it (see the next section to hear about the Nium Docs section of the website), and it’s pretty easy to navigate. We like how information is laid out and is visually easy to take in. Other things we appreciate on their site include a list of their Global Licenses that’s easy to find, and also a foreign exchange rate calculator so potential customers can see what it would cost to convert payments. However, we think it’s worth mentioning that there is not a place on the website that gives upfront pricing information (maybe because Nium deals with so many different currencies?). 

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User Experience

Like with Finix, we weren’t able to actually implement Nium’s infrastructure, but we were able to check out their “Getting Started” section. Overall we found this to be complicated and not that helpful for trying to see what Nium’s infrastructure is actually like. For example, the “Key Concept” section is mostly marketing jargon and not the actual specifics of how to implement. The rest of the “Nium docs” website was somewhat difficult to navigate and we found certain concepts were scattered around. For example, in the Wallet section, there’s documentation for how to get a wallet balance or conduct wallet-to-wallet transfers but no actual information about how to create a Wallet object in the first place or how to “attach” it to a customer.

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Overall Recommendation

Because of its history of  working with global payments, after the research we’ve conducted we conclude that Nium would be a great option to consider for a business that works with a broad global audience, assuming that the costs for the markets your business needs to access aren't too high.