Wirex, a stablecoin payments infrastructure provider and principal member of both Visa and Mastercard, has integrated the Tempo blockchain as a settlement layer for enterprise stablecoin card programs, the companies announced on September 10. Fintechs and digital platforms building card products on Wirex can now pick Tempo to settle the stablecoin leg of their transactions, alongside whatever rails they already use. The first joint enterprise programs are entering production, though neither company named customers, launch dates or markets.
How the split of work works
Wirex handles the regulated side of a card program: issuance under its own licenses, wallets, compliance and the connection to card networks. Tempo handles the settlement leg, moving value between parties on a blockchain built for payments. A cardholder spends from a stablecoin balance, and behind the scenes the funds move over Tempo rather than a traditional settlement chain. The cardholder sees a normal card transaction; the difference is in how money moves between the issuer, the merchant acquirer and the program’s treasury.
Tempo, a payments-focused layer-1, claims sub-second finality, fees paid in stablecoins rather than a separate gas token, structured transaction data for reconciliation, and optional privacy features. The company says its network processed more than $1 billion in stablecoin transfers over a recent 30-day period. Its Tempo Zones feature is designed to protect balance and transaction privacy while allowing selective disclosure for audits and compliance checks, which matters for programs that must answer to card network rules and banking regulators.
“Tempo gives our partners fast, predictable, and private settlement, while Tempo’s advisory and engineering teams help them move from integration to production faster,” said Daniel Rowlands, General Manager at Wirex.
Ani Narayan, a go-to-market executive at Tempo, framed the deal from the other side: Wirex gives companies building on the network a route to issue stablecoin-backed cards, pairing the blockchain with regulated card infrastructure and implementation support. Both companies are selling the same thing to enterprise clients, which is time. Building a compliant card program from scratch takes quarters; renting the stack takes weeks.
Why a second rail matters
Until now, card issuers experimenting with stablecoin settlement have mostly had to pick a single chain and live with it. Multi-rail support changes the calculus for enterprise buyers: a program can route settlement by cost, speed or jurisdiction, and switch without rebuilding the card stack. For Wirex, offering Tempo is also a hedge on its own infrastructure, letting partners choose rather than committing the whole platform to one network.
The deal fits a busy year for Wirex. The company launched a Visa Direct service in February that lets businesses fund card payouts with stablecoins, joined Visa’s Agentic Ready program in June to test payments initiated by AI agents, and has been part of Mastercard’s Crypto Credential system since 2025. Wirex says its infrastructure reached $1 billion in annualized on-chain volume 131 days after launch, then doubled the annualized rate 110 days later. Annualized figures extrapolate from a shorter window, so the second number reflects run-rate, not cumulative volume, a distinction the company itself flagged.
Competitive context
The stablecoin card market is getting crowded from both ends. MoneyGram launched a stablecoin-backed Visa card in Colombia this month, its first live market, while Nubank’s new Nu Global accounts convert deposits into USDC and EURC. Fidelity has been pushing its FIDD stablecoin toward institutional settlement rails, and U.S. Bank has tested stablecoin payments on Stellar between its own entities. Each of these pairs a distribution channel with a settlement chain, and the chains are competing for that role.
Tempo’s bet is that payments-specific design, stablecoin-denominated fees and privacy controls will beat general-purpose chains for card settlement. Its backers include fintech and payments companies with distribution of their own, which gives it a route to volume that pure infrastructure chains lack. Wirex’s integration is a distribution win in exactly that sense: every enterprise card program built on Wirex is now a potential Tempo customer, and every Tempo deployment is a reference for the next pitch.
The same dynamic is playing out among the card networks themselves. Visa and Mastercard have both spent two years building stablecoin settlement into their own rails, Visa through settlement in USDC and Mastercard through its Multi-Token Network. An infrastructure provider like Wirex sitting on top of both networks, and now offering blockchain settlement underneath them, occupies an awkward middle position that could also be a durable one: whatever wins at the settlement layer, Wirex still issues the card.
What to watch
The deal has no public-market angle. Wirex is privately held, and Tempo has not launched a token, so there is no price to trade on the announcement. The proof will come when the first named programs go live and disclose volumes. The open questions are the ones that decide enterprise adoption in payments: whether stablecoin-denominated fees actually undercut card network costs at scale, how privacy Zones interact with the Travel Rule obligations now rolling out across jurisdictions, and whether enterprises want a second rail at all or would rather standardize on one.
Pricing detail is the other gap. Neither company disclosed the economics of the integration, and enterprise buyers evaluating the stack will want to know how settlement fees on Tempo compare with what they would pay moving the same value through Visa’s or Mastercard’s own stablecoin settlement options. Sub-second finality is a real technical advantage for treasury operations, but payments decisions are usually made on total cost and counterparty risk, not latency alone.
Wirex and Tempo say they will work together to bring more fintech and enterprise card programs onto the network. Neither disclosed economic terms, timelines or the markets where the first programs will run. Watch for named customers and volume disclosures over the next quarter, which is when the claims in this announcement either get numbers behind them or do not.