BaaS Platform NovoPayment Raises $19M

NovoPayment has raised $19 million in a Series A round to scale its Banking-as-a-Serivce (BaaS) platform, the company said in a news release Tuesday (April 19).

With the funding — and buoyed by a recent 40% increase in client growth — the Miami company says plans to “continue increasing capabilities, introduce new features and functionalities, heighten security, and capitalize on US market opportunities.”

That means hiring more than 100 engineers, business development, and product experts while opening hubs in Austin and San Francisco. The company has offices in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador and is focusing on growing in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Expanding access to financial services, offering new digital experiences, increasing speed to market, and reducing IT costs all comes down to infrastructure,” said NovoPayment Co-founder and CEO Anabel Perez. “We’re grateful to have investors who recognize our platform’s role in closing the gap between banks’ legacy systems and their customers’ evolving needs and enabling any business to manage and embed innovative financial services into their end-user experience.”

Venezuela-born Perez and her team launched NovoPayment in 2014, setting up shop in Miami, which the company calls the “Capital of LatAm” and “the new entryway to the USA.” In doing so, Perez got an early foothold in the Latin America/Caribbean region, which is now a $7 billion FinTech market.

The company says its success “comes amid a challenging climate for women entrepreneurs” noting that only 2% of venture capital funding last year went to all-female founding teams, with the same percentage going to firms with Latin American founders.

See also: Banking-As-A-Service’s Secret Sauce

PYMNTS spoke to Perez in 2020 about the rise of BaaS and the evolution of banking at a time when traditional financial institutions could feel challenged to match the offerings of challenger banks.

“Traditional banking providers cannot accommodate all of their own [customers’] needs,” Perez told Webster. “It would take years to deliver and millions of dollars [in investments].”

She added that means a growing need for FinTechs, as well as an increasingly crucial role for them to fill in terms of payments and financial services innovation.

“We can provide better, cheaper and faster services,” Perez said. NovoPayment’s role, she said, is to provide the place where other FinTechs and banks get together.