Moving money across borders has always been slower, more expensive, and more opaque than moving it within them. Currencycloud was founded in London in 2012 to fix the infrastructure layer of that problem — not for consumers, but for the fintechs and financial institutions building products for consumers. Its API platform handles cross-border payments, currency conversion, and multi-currency account management, powering the FX and international transfer features of companies including Revolut, Starling, and dozens of other fintechs that would rather not build this infrastructure themselves. That B2B positioning — invisible to end users, essential to the products they love — is precisely what made Currencycloud attractive to Visa, which acquired it in 2021 for $963 million. The acquisition made strategic sense: Visa gets embedded into the infrastructure of the next generation of financial products, and Currencycloud gets the distribution and balance sheet of one of the world's largest payment networks. In the plumbing of European fintech, Currencycloud is a pipe that a surprising number of products run through.