SoFi and Kraken Parent Payward Link Banking Rails to Crypto Markets in 24/7 Settlement Deal

SoFi Technologies and Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, announced a partnership Thursday that connects SoFi’s banking and dollar settlement infrastructure to Kraken’s trading platform.

The deal has three pieces. Payward joins SoFi Exchange Network, SoFi’s real-time settlement network, which lets Kraken’s institutional clients clear and settle US dollar transactions 24 hours a day, seven days a week rather than waiting for banking hours. Kraken will list SoFiUSD, SoFi’s bank-issued stablecoin, which is redeemable one-to-one for dollars. And SoFi will use Kraken Prime, Payward’s prime brokerage, as an additional liquidity source for customer crypto trades, with qualified custody available as the relationship grows.

“The financial system should not shut down when markets stay open,” said Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi, tying the deal to the company’s push to build always-on infrastructure on a national bank charter. For SoFi, the payoff is distribution and pricing. Payward co-CEO David Ripley argued that millions of people will make their first crypto purchase inside the app that already holds their paycheck. For Payward, it is access to bank rails it does not yet own outright.

SoFi booked $134.3 million in crypto transaction revenue in the second quarter, up 10% from the first, against $1.2 billion in adjusted net revenue. SoFi says 15.8 million members use the app, and its SoFi Tech Solutions arm serves more than 134 million global accounts. SoFi launched Big Business Banking in April to combine enterprise banking and digital-asset services, and the two companies said the relationship could later extend into payments, treasury and lending.

Payward has been assembling a regulated banking stack ahead of a long-delayed IPO. It applied to the OCC in May for a national trust charter, and its Wyoming-chartered bank, Kraken Financial, obtained a Federal Reserve master account in March.

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