Nium and DBS Bank announced a strategic partnership on 29 September 2025 at the Sibos 2025 conference in Frankfurt, bringing together Singapore's largest bank and one of Asia's leading fintech infrastructure providers around a shared ambition to modernise cross-border payments for corporate and SME banking clients. Under the arrangement, DBS will use Nium's global payment rails to offer real-time cross-border payment services to its business customers, extending the speed, reach, and predictability of international transfers available through the bank's corporate banking platform. The announcement was made at one of the transaction banking industry's most prominent annual gatherings.
The partnership covers more than 100 countries, a footprint that Nium has assembled through a combination of direct payment licences, banking relationships, and integrations with local payment infrastructure across major markets in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The arrangement is designed to complement DBS's existing SWIFT connectivity rather than replace it, adding a real-time settlement layer alongside the correspondent banking infrastructure that continues to underpin a significant portion of institutional cross-border payment volumes globally.
REAL-TIME RAILS FILL GAPS IN SWIFT COVERAGE
SWIFT remains the backbone of international wholesale payments, but its correspondent banking model can introduce delays and unpredictability in settlement timing, particularly for payments into markets where correspondent chains are long or the number of participating institutions is limited. Nium's network, built on direct integrations with local real-time payment systems across more than 100 countries, offers an alternative route for transactions where speed and certainty of settlement are priorities, or where the correspondent banking route is comparatively slow or opaque in terms of fee disclosure and delivery timing.
For DBS corporate and SME clients, the practical benefit of the partnership is access to a broader and faster payments capability within the bank's existing digital interface, without requiring those clients to establish separate relationships with alternative payment providers or integrate additional technology platforms. Treasury teams and finance functions managing cross-border supplier payments, payroll, or working capital flows across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas stand to benefit from reduced settlement times and greater certainty about when funds will arrive at their destination.
SIBOS PROVIDES GLOBAL STAGE FOR LAUNCH
The selection of Sibos as the launch venue for the announcement is deliberate and carries strategic significance. The annual conference, organised by SWIFT and attended by banks, financial market infrastructures, correspondent banking specialists, and technology providers from across the globe, is the principal gathering of the transaction banking and payments community. Announcing the partnership at Sibos signals both the institutional seriousness of the collaboration and its intended relevance to the corporate banking market, where cross-border payment speed and efficiency are perennial and intensifying competitive differentiators.
DBS has invested consistently in its digital and fintech partnership capabilities over recent years, and the Nium tie-up fits a pattern of the bank seeking to augment its technology stack through strategic relationships rather than attempting to build every capability in-house. For Nium, the DBS relationship provides access to one of Asia's most internationally active and well-regarded corporate banking franchises, a partnership that validates its infrastructure proposition for institutional clients well beyond the consumer and early-stage SME segments where many fintech payment providers have historically been most active.