Railsbank, a global open banking and compliance platform, has just secured $1.2 million in a funding round led by Firestartr. Railsbank’s vision is to give digitally native companies access to global transaction banking with 5 lines of code.
The London-based startup aims to revolutionize the access to international bank transactions by giving digitally native companies, via a single global API, the ability to instantly create bank accounts (with IBANs) and connect to payment schemes (e.g. SEPA, SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, Direct Debit, FasterPayments etc.) to receive and send money to/from these accounts; with all transactions in line with compliance policy enforced through Railsbanks’s unique Compliance Firewall. Traditionally companies would need to invest significant capital and 6-12 months of project time to achieve the same for each country and/or payment scheme. Railsbank was founded in 2015.
The fresh capital will be used to build out Railsbank’s Partner Network (who deliver the underlying financial products to customers) to initially offer pan-European capabilities to customers and take their Open Banking platform from closed beta to live (although anyone can sign up to the PLAY sandbox and if in Europe can sign-up to the live money sandbox PLAYLIve, which can issue three current accounts with IBANs in real time and send / receive money via SEPA).
The latest investment round, led by Firestartr, included Kima Ventures and industry angels Peter Jackson (CEO WorldPay UK), Tim Levene (Betfair, Augmentum Capital) and Phillip Riese (former Chairman of Zopa, NED Cross River Bank).
Firestartr Chairman and General Partner Richard Muirhead stated: “Most of the market is focused on PSD2 and not focused where RailsBank are, for example, building a global bank, delivered as a platform. We believe this gives them an advantage and look forward to working with them on their journey as they scale RailsBank from seed stage to Series A and beyond.”
Awarded the FinTech50 2017, winners of the Simmons & Simmons FinTech Fund in 2016 and Startup Pitch winners at Paris FinTech Forum 2017, Railsbank was also the “Startup-in-Residence” for the 2016 Startupbootcamp FinTech 2016 Cohort. Not bad.
