Mastercard closed its $1.8 billion BVNK purchase on August 3

Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK, a London-based stablecoin payments infrastructure company, on August 3, according to a company statement. The card network first announced the transaction on March 17 at a value of up to $1.8 billion, including $300 million in contingent payments, and had guided toward a close by the end of the year.

“Digital currencies, particularly stablecoins, are increasingly addressing real-world needs,” Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said in the statement, naming cross-border business payments, remittances, payouts, settlement and treasury flows as the areas involved.

Founded in 2021, BVNK provides infrastructure that lets businesses hold, move, manage and convert value across both conventional currencies and digital ones, and supports payments across major blockchain networks in more than 130 countries. Mastercard said combining that technology with its own network will help financial institutions, fintechs and enterprises expand stablecoin and tokenised asset use.

BVNK said in a blog post the same day that the acquisition will not change its existing operations or client relationships, and that work is under way to extend Mastercard capabilities to its customers, including wider payment reach and card functionality, according to The Block.

The completion places Mastercard among the card networks buying rather than partnering for capabilities they previously accessed through third parties. Visa announced its own $2.4 billion purchase of the fraud detection company BioCatch on the same day the BVNK deal closed, though that transaction is not expected to complete until Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027.

Mastercard trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MA and reported second-quarter net revenue of $9.28 billion on July 30, up 14 percent from a year earlier.