UK banking-as-a-service outfit Railsbank has raised $70 million to promote its brand and products across the globe.
The latest fundraise was led by Anthos Capital and attracted 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. Existing investors also participated.
The latest round follows a $37 million raise in November last year as the firm laid the foundations for its launch in the US.
Railsbank’s products have been developed out of its zero-legacy core finance platform and include banking-as-a-service and cards-as-a-service. Available via simple APIs, the platform provides a seamless entry point into money-moving financial services for fintechs, telcos, supermarkets and consumer brands.
The company occupies an enviable position in the embedded finance space by being both a regulated financial institution and principle card issuing member of Visa and Mastercard, meaning that users don't have to grapple with underlying industry legacy infrastructure, operations, risk policies and ways of working.
“Think of Railsbank as being the financial services layer of the Internet,” says Nigel Verdon, CEO and co-founder of Railsbank. “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 aging 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, not at the point when traditional providers forced them to."
Bain Capital Ventures has predicted that the global addressable market for embedded finance could be worth $7.2 trillion by 2030.
Chris Adelsbach, Managing Partner of Outrun Ventures, comments: "As an early stage fintech investor, I've witnessed a remarkable change in the volume of companies that are building next generation businesses using Railsbank. I speak to dozens of founders every week and I've rarely gone through a week where a company doesn't tell me that they are working with Railsbank. Embedded finance makes financial services far more accessible for customers and Railsbank has a solution that is in a league of its own.”