Ansa announces a digital wallet infrastructure platform for merchants, alongside its first round of funding of $5.4 million.
The investment round was “led by Christina Melas-Kyriazi at Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Nimi Katragadda at Box Group, Nichole Wischoff at Wischoff Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, The Fintech Fund, and Susa Ventures.”
Female investors and angels “contributed over 75 percent of the funding round.”
Credit and debit cards “account for 57 percent of consumer payments in the US, but the true costs to merchants remain hidden to the average consumer.”
Card fees, “particularly for micropayments, can represent well over 12.5 percent of the transaction.”
Ansa co-founders Sophia Goldberg and JT Cho witnessed “the challenges faced by merchants firsthand while working for Adyen and Affirm, respectively.”
High payments costs are “felt by merchants across categories: from coffee, quick serve, and transportation to vertical platforms, marketplaces, and creator platforms wanting to support micro-transactions.”
This is especially true “for those who have more unique needs, what Ansa calls HULT merchants: habitual use, low transaction value.”
These merchants have “to patch together vendors, invest in a cross-team complex engineering project, and spend large sums on compliance to get a closed-loop program live today.”
With Ansa, a merchant can “create a wallet within weeks rather than quarters with their flexible, API-first wallet-as-a-service platform.”
The economics of payments “have stayed surprisingly the same for the last 70 years when compared to how commerce has changed.”
Ansa is “built around the co-founders’ shared ethos that payments should be a tool, not a hurdle.”
Merchants often “build hacks for payments to work for their use cases, rather than payments empowering their businesses.”
Goldberg said:
“Your most loyal customers shouldn’t cost you the most. We want to help merchants strengthen their relationship with their most loyal customers, while still optimizing unit economics.”
Sophia spent over four years in Adyen’s Product and Account Management teams and wrote the best-selling book “The Field Guide to Global Payments.”
JT was previously “an engineer at Google, Affirm, and Impira.”
Goldberg added:
“Over the last few years, digital wallets have become an increasingly popular payment method. We’ve seen this adoption in other countries such as China through AliPay and WeChat Pay, and expect this trend to continue globally. In the US, Starbucks has been a leader in closed-loop mobile payments with its wallet. Overall payments in the US lag behind the world. We’re on a mission to help merchants embed payments in a way that fits their use cases best.”
Ansa is currently piloting with customers “in the coffee and quick serve industries although their platform can support many verticals.”
With Ansa’s innovative solution, merchants “can quickly and compliantly launch smooth, digitally native customer balances to increase revenue and decrease cost of payments.”
Customers who “keep a merchant balance tend to visit more often and have higher transaction sizes, and significant cost savings can be funneled into loyalty programs or marketing to further strengthen that customer relationship.”
Ansa has started partnering with merchants “to improve their unit economics and increase revenue per customer.”