UK-based Railsbank, an open banking and Regtech solution provider, has secured additional funding with contributions from Visa and Global Brain, a Japanese venture capital firm.
In September 2019, Railsbank had acquired $10 million in capital as part of its Series A round. The amount of the compliance firm’s latest investment has not been shared publicly, however, TechCrunch reported that it’s in the “millions of dollars.”
In addition to the capital injection, Visa has committed to an extensive five-year partnership with Railsbank, in order to assist the Regtech company with marketing its products and services in the Southeast Asia region. Railsbank is now a Visa principal issuing member.
Railsbank is managed by Nigel Verdon, the founder of Currencycloud. The company recently established a business office in Singapore, in order to market its platform of APIs, developed specifically for banking, processing payments, and offering compliance services.
Global Brain’s management said that there’s a lot of potential in the open banking technology sector.
The VC firm added:
“Corporates, especially in Asia, are more willing to have banking services and Railsbank can provide them with a turnkey solution for this.”
Visa’s latest investment in Railsbank has come after the payments giant recently made a strategic investment and entered a commercial agreement with Neat, a Hong Kong-based business account provider.
Last year, Verdon had noted:
“In 2011, [we] saw the emergence of the Fintech 1.0 scene with people like Currencycloud (which I also founded), TransferWise, Betterment, Bank Simple, etc. This was enabled by the opening up of regulation as the macro trend. We currently see [a] similar regulator macro trend in SE Asia emerging and also the macro trend of tech companies being the distributors of financial products driven by access to cheap smartphones by firms like Xiaomi.”