Morgan Stanley Buys Stake in UK Payments Firm Sokin

British payments firm Sokin is planning to expand following an investment by Morgan Stanley.

Investment funds managed by the banking giant had purchased a stake in Sokin, the company announced Wednesday (July 24), designed to speed its expansion.

“Sokin was founded in 2019 with a simple vision to remove the borders, barriers, and burdens associated with international payments,” Sokin said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “Today it enables global businesses to transfer, hold and exchange over 100 currencies with its multi-currency IBAN and local currency accounts — all through one comprehensive platform.”

Although Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital led the transaction, other investors include former PayPal executives Gary Marino and Mark Britto, and Aurum Partners, the investment fund affiliated with the owners of the San Francisco 49ers.

According to the release, Sokin allows for more than $2.5 billion in transaction volume each year and expects to grow even further. Its customers include businesses in a range of sectors, “from freight and logistics — to Premier League football clubs, enabling them to manage global payments and financials with speed, efficiency, and transparency.”

PYMNTS examined the state of the cross-border payments space recently in a conversation with Ram Sundaram, COO at TerraPay.

As that report noted, the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require a reduction in the cost of cross-border remittances, which currently stands at around 8%.

Sundaram, who spoke with PYMNTS during a discussion for the series “What’s Next in Payments: The Halftime Report,” said that his company’s mission is in line with this goal, as it tries to reduce these costs further to enable low-value transactions without prohibitive fees.

Lowering these costs can unlock new use cases for cross-border services, thus expanding revenue streams for financial institutions and service providers.

“If you do a $10 transaction today, you’ll probably spend a very significant part of that $10 as fees. And we need to get to a point where that base fee is something that you don’t have to think about, so that you can do low-value transactions at scale — that could change the landscape of cross-border payments and remittances,” Sundaram said.

“Apart from that, the way that you generate more revenues is that you create new use cases,” Sundaram said.