Railsbank, a fintech startup that was co-founded by Currencycloud co-founder Nigel Verdon, has secured $1.2 million during its latest funding round, which was led by seed investment firm Firestartr, with participation from 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).
Founded in 2015, Railsbank is described as an open banking API and platform. The company stated its vision is to give digitally native companies access to global transaction banking with 5 lines of code and is revolutionising the access to international transaction banking by giving digitally native companies, through a single global API, the ability to instantly create bank accounts (with IBAN) and connect to payment schemes (e.g. SEPA, SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, Direct Debit, FasterPayments) to receive and send money to/from these accounts; with all transactions in line with compliance policy enforced through its unique Compliance Firewall.
“At Railsbank, we have set out on a journey to enable the future of finance through freeing the finance industry of the shackles of legacy technology / process and at the same time enhancing regulatory compliance.”
Verdon stated:
“We are delighted to have closed this latest round and received backing from such leading firms and figures in the investment community. It underlines the confidence we and others have in Railsbank, and our business model, and it will allow the company to continue to develop in the direction and at the pace we have planned.”
Firestartr Chairman and General Partner Richard Muirhead also commented:
“We are very excited to welcome Nigel, Clive and their awesome team to the Firestartr portfolio. 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.”
Railsbank added that the funds from the funding round will be used to build out its Partner Network 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).