London-headquartered Fintech Railsbank, which provides virtual banking services, is approaching Unicorn status (valued at $1 billion or more), Sky News confirmed on Friday (February 4, 2022).
The UK-based Fintech firm recently acquired certain assets of Wirecard, the collapsed and fraudulent German payments firm.
As mentioned in the update, Railsbank is currently focused on securing about $100 million in capital. Some of those funds could come from FT Partners, which is a highly-active Fintech-focused investment bank.
As noted by the sources, the additional funding might make Railsbank a Unicorn — despite the public markets sell-off of technology stocks negatively affecting valuations.
In 2021, Railsbank Co-founder Nigel Verdon stated that the firm was reshaping the finance sector in the same manner that tech giant Apple did to the music industry when they launched iTunes. Verdon indicated at the time that Railsbank had almost a $1 billion valuation.
As covered recently, embedded finance experiences platform Railsbank has driven a stake into the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) market by “giving retailers a greater share of the spoils.”
Current BNPL providers brand their own offerings which “take the customer away from the original retailer’s website and onto their own,” the team at Railsbank writes in a blog post. They further explained that here, they “engage and nourish, meaning the original seller misses out on a wide range of marketing opportunities.”
According to the update, this won’t go on for much longer as Railsbank “enters the market with a white label BNPL credit solution which allows retailers to offer branded, fully-integrated payment experiences.”
As reported in November 2021, Railsbank (Railspay in Australia) and Douugh (ASX: DOU) have partnered to launch a “responsible financial super app.” The app is said to offer an embedded finance experience including bank accounts, payments, cards, money management, stock investing, crypto and more.
The app will launch in Australia, as well as the UK, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The app will start with Australia via Railsbank’s “banking as a service” feature with Volt Bank. Volt holds a full banking license and can handle deposits. Railsbank is regulated in both the UK and Europe and is a principal issuing member of Mastercard.