Flywire processed $8.2 billion in payments last quarter and still posted a loss. That tension sits at the center of what the company is trying to build, and a quiet infrastructure deal announced in August shows exactly what kind of bet it is making to close that gap.

On August 12, Flywire expanded its partnership with Trustly, a payments technology firm, to bring what the industry calls "open banking" to customers across the US and Canada. The practical meaning: instead of typing in routing numbers and account numbers (the part of cross-border payments that fails most often), a payer simply logs in to their bank and authorizes the transfer directly. Trustly runs a real-time balance check at that moment, catching insufficient funds before the payment goes through rather than days later when a reversal creates a mess for everyone involved.

It is unglamorous infrastructure work. But for a company that moves tuition payments, hotel deposits, and healthcare bills across dozens of currencies and time zones, reducing failed transactions is not a side feature. It is the business.

The growth case

Flywire's second-quarter results, reported on August 4, 2026, were genuinely strong on the surface. Revenue grew 27.2% year over year to $167.7 million. Payment volume jumped 38.2%. The company signed more than 200 new clients across 45 countries in a single quarter, added nearly 90 U.S. hotel properties, and saw education revenue outside its core markets grow more than 30% year over year. Management raised its full-year guidance on both revenue growth and operating profit margin.

That is the kind of acceleration that earns attention.

The margin problem

But the cost of that growth showed up clearly in the numbers. Gross margin fell to 53.4% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 57.0% a year earlier. Adjusted gross margin dropped from 61.1% to 56.6%. For every dollar of revenue Flywire brought in, it kept less than it did twelve months ago.

A company growing this fast can often justify some margin compression: you spend to acquire clients and build infrastructure now, and the economics improve as the base scales. That is the standard pitch. The problem is that Flywire still posted a net loss of $8.1 million for the quarter, even as revenue pushed past $167 million. The loss shrank from $12 million a year earlier, but it did not disappear.

There is also a specific risk the company named directly. CFO Cosmin Pitigoi said Flywire is keeping its assumptions for the education vertical conservative because of the current visa policy environment. Education has historically been Flywire's largest business, built on moving tuition and enrollment payments for international students. If US and Canadian visa policies tighten and fewer international students enroll, that revenue base shrinks regardless of how well Flywire executes on technology.

What the open banking push is really about

The Trustly expansion is a hedge against both problems at once. If Flywire can reduce the number of payments that fail or reverse, it lowers the operational cost of each transaction, which pushes margins back up. And if it can make the payment experience reliably smooth, it becomes harder for universities, hospitals, or hotels to justify switching to a competitor, even as those markets get more crowded.

Flywire and Trustly have partnered since 2017, first in Europe. Kate Moran, Flywire's Vice President of Global Payments, described the expansion as "applying the open banking infrastructure we've successfully scaled across Europe to North America, enabling our clients to confidently offer their payers a proven experience."

The Trustly deal is not a revenue announcement. It is a signal about where Flywire thinks its competitive advantage comes from: not the size of the payment volumes it moves, but the reliability of each individual transaction. At $8.2 billion a quarter and still losing money, reliable execution is not a nice-to-have. It is the only path to a business that actually works.