Monavate, the Cambridge-based FCA-regulated e-money institution, has partnered with LMAX Group to connect its payments platform to Omnia Exchange, the institutional liquidity and execution layer operated by the London foreign exchange and digital asset venue. The integration, announced on 5 August 2026, is delivered through a single API and is designed to give Monavate’s business clients access to institutional-grade execution across fiat currencies, stablecoins and crypto assets without requiring them to build independent trading or risk functions.
Monavate was acquired earlier this year by Exodus Movement, the publicly listed digital asset firm trading on NYSE American, and the LMAX partnership reflects the direction of travel for the combined entity: providing the infrastructure plumbing for businesses that want to issue, move and settle money across borders without relying on legacy correspondent banking rails.
What the deal does
The practical capability the partnership adds is notable. Through Omnia, Monavate clients can access real-time pricing and execution, hedge lower-value payment flows without being subject to minimum trade sizes, and reduce intraday settlement risk. That last point matters most for payment providers running mixed fiat and digital asset books: intraday FX and crypto exposure is typically managed through either a banking relationship or a prime brokerage, both of which carry cost, credit requirements and operational overhead. An API layer into an institutional execution venue simplifies that stack.
Oscar Vickerman, head of strategic distribution at LMAX Group, said: “As businesses increasingly look to digital assets as part of payment and settlement workflows, access to deep liquidity, reliable execution and scalable infrastructure becomes increasingly important.”
Michael Rolph, chief executive of Monavate, framed the deal in direct terms: “Payments are moving onchain, and the businesses that win will be the ones that can issue, move and settle money anywhere without touching legacy systems.”
Market context
The partnership sits in the middle of a structural shift that is reshaping the payments wholesale layer. Several well-capitalised platforms are converging on the same proposition: a unified settlement layer that handles fiat, stablecoin and tokenised asset flows under a single interface, removing the need for payment providers to maintain separate banking-as-a-service, crypto custody and FX hedging relationships. Circle with its USDC infrastructure, Fireblocks on the custody and settlement side, and B2B payment networks building stablecoin rails are all competing for a share of the same institutional payment flow.
The regulatory backdrop in the UK and EU is becoming more structured around exactly this type of infrastructure. The FCA’s work on stablecoin payment regulation and the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which is progressively coming into force, are creating clearer operating frameworks for firms that bridge traditional payments and digital assets. Monavate holds FCA e-money institution status and Mastercard, Visa and Discover principal membership, which gives it a compliance foundation that purely crypto-native settlement providers cannot yet match.
The metrics Monavate disclosed in the release give some sense of the scale it is working at: more than 6.3 million cards issued and over 13.5 billion US dollars in processed payments to date. Whether the LMAX integration translates into a meaningful reduction in settlement cost or treasury risk for its clients will be the commercial test, and neither company provided benchmarked before-and-after data alongside the announcement.
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