London-based Railsbank is a fintech company with an open banking API and platform that gives regulated and unregulated companies access to global banking. In a recent development, the company announced that it raised $70M (approx €59.35M) in a fresh round of funding.
Investors
The investment was led by investment firm Anthos Capital. In addition, the round also saw participation from a range of investors, including Central Capital (VC arm of Indonesia’s largest privately held bank), Cohen and Company (the founder of Bancorp), and Chris Adelsbach’s new fund Outrun Ventures. Besides, existing investors also participated in the latest round.
Capital to expand across Europe and other geographies
With this latest round, Railsbank plans to utilise the funds to further expand its various Embedded Finance products (Banking-as-a-Service, Cards-as-a-Service, and Credit-as-a-Service) across Europe, Asia Pacific, and North America. Their aim is to help customers remodel and democratise access to the financial services industry.
Currently, the company’s platform is used by customers such as fintechs, telcos, supermarkets and consumer brands to improve the way millions of consumers and SMEs access, use and manage their money.
Enabling a bank, business, or brand to be a fintech
Founded in 2016 by Clive Mitchell and Nigel Verdon, Railsbank claims to be the pioneer and innovator in the global Banking-as-a-Platform (BaaP) sector. The company’s platform allows marketers, product managers, developers to prototype, launch, and scale their financial product vision using its open finance platform, financial operations, regulatory licensing, and APIs.
Besides, the platform also provides fintech companies with a range of wholesale banking services, including IBANs, receiving money, sending money, converting money, direct debit, issuing cards, and managing credit through APIs.
Explaining about Railsbank, Nigel Verdon, CEO & co-founder of Railsbank, says, “Think of Railsbank as being the financial services layer of the Internet. We are transforming the finance industry in the same way that Apple did to the music industry when they created iTunes. Too much of the current global financial services system is made up of ageing legacy technology and operational processes, making it unnecessarily complicated, highly expensive and nearly impossible for innovators to create the ‘Spotify’ of financial services.”
“We are changing that at Railsbank by combining our ‘zero legacy’ platform with deconstructing financial services into individual digital components. Because we have created these individual financial components, our customers can easily embed financial products directly into their own customer experiences at exactly the point where consumers and SMEs need financial services,” adds Verdon.
Currently, Railsbank is live and enabling customers in the UK, Europe, SE Asia, Australia, and the US. Besides, the company claims to be the only global BaaP player.