Payward acquires Reap to fold card issuance, cross-border payments, and stablecoin treasury into Kraken’s B2B stack

Payward, the financial infrastructure company behind Kraken, has completed its acquisition of payments infrastructure firm Reap. The deal gives Payward Services a cleaner route into embedded card issuance, cross-border money movement, and stablecoin-based treasury management — exactly the kind of stack high-risk merchants and their PSPs care about when they want fewer vendors and more control over settlement.

1. The acquisition was announced in May and completed on Wednesday, July 1. Payward said the transaction is meant to expand Payward Services, its B2B infrastructure platform, and open a path to “globally regulated infrastructure” for stablecoin payments and card issuance.
2. Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, said Reap allows partners to issue cards, originate cross-border payments, and manage treasury “against on-chain liquidity that settles in near real time, programmatically, through one API” instead of moving through correspondent banks and regional processors. In plain English: fewer hops, fewer counterparties, and less operational glue for the partner to maintain.
3. Payward said Reap now sits inside a broader infrastructure layer that includes embedded card issuance, cross-border money movement, stablecoin-based treasury management, and access to Payward’s global liquidity, custody, and settlement infrastructure. The company’s pitch is that partners can use these functions through one platform rather than stitching together separate vendors.
4. Reap Co-Founder Daren Guo said stablecoin settlement is becoming “the default” for how businesses move money across borders, and that the company was built to support embedded card issuance and financial operations. With Payward, Reap says it can expand into more markets and more partners.

For PSPs and high-risk operators, the useful bit here is not the corporate backdrop; it is the direction of travel. Payward is packaging cards, cross-border flows, and stablecoin treasury into one B2B infrastructure layer, which is the sort of setup that can reduce dependency on correspondent banking chains and regional processors when a business wants faster settlement and tighter treasury control.