Reap's priorities have changed little since Payward, the parent company of Kraken, completed its acquisition of the Hong Kong-based stablecoin card issuer in July, co-founder and CEO Daren Guo told Blockhead . Speaking on the sidelines of Reap's Agentic Finance & Payments Summit during Token2049 week in Singapore, Guo said the deal mainly accelerated a roadmap Reap was already working through.
"It's very complementary," Guo said. "They have a very strong presence in the US and Europe. We bring a lot of capabilities and expertise in Asia and Latin America."
Payward agreed to buy Reap in May for up to $600 million in cash and stock, in a deal that valued Payward at $20 billion, and completed the acquisition on July 1 . Reap continues to operate as a standalone brand under Guo. Its licences are meant to extend Payward's reach across Asia-Pacific and the Americas, while Payward's EU and US licences open those markets to Reap.
Guo said Reap's location matters less than where its products end up being used. Although the company is headquartered in Hong Kong, he said most of its customers are based elsewhere. "Where you're offering the service from does not necessarily equate to where the services or products are consumed," he said. "We are exporting a lot of the infrastructure, the capabilities, to places where that infrastructure is the thinnest or the least developed."
Latin America is the region Guo singled out. "Hong Kong is a hub, but at the same time, Mexico is a critical hub for us as well," he said, describing a network of regional hubs that lets Reap offer a fuller set of products to customers. Reap secured a money transmitter registration in Mexico in March and has local teams in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.
In September, Reap and Visa announced an expanded collaboration to take Reap's stablecoin-linked credit card programs to more than 100 markets, extending its issuing infrastructure into EMEA and Africa. The same announcement put Visa's stablecoin settlement volume at an annual run rate of $20 billion, up 15 times year on year, across more than 160 stablecoin card programs globally.
Guo said agents fit Reap's existing model because, like its card and payments products, they are "borderless in nature." He described agents as a catalyst "to create a lot of net new financial services that don't fundamentally exist today," and said Reap and Payward together are building "the new set of rails for financial services globally, and agents is very much a big part of that equation."
Reap's agentic payments product , built on Visa Intelligent Commerce, issues tokenised, agent-specific Visa credentials with programmable spending limits and passkey authentication, so that an AI agent can complete a checkout without ever seeing the underlying card number. Blockhead understands the product is running as a pilot with a group of design partners, with a wider launch targeted before the end of the year.
The commercial case remains unproven. Reap has not disclosed how many agent-initiated transactions it has processed, and the company's pitch depends on merchants, and the bot-detection services that sit in front of their checkouts, learning to treat registered AI agents as legitimate buyers.
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