Railsbank Nets $70M To Expand Embedded Finance Platform

Railsbank has raised $70 million as it continues to grow its Fintech-as-a-Service platform on a global scale, the open banking platform announced.

This latest round of fundraising was led by Anthos Capital. Other investors included Chris Adelsbach’s Outrun Ventures, Cohen and Company, and Central Capital as well as existing investors.

The London-based firm said it will use these funds to expand its embedded finance products across Europe, Asia Pacific and North America. These products include its Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), Cards-as-a-Service and Credit-as-a-Service. Per the post from the company, the idea is that they will help their customers remodel as well as democratize access to the financial services industry.

According to Railsbank, FinTechs to supermarkets to telecoms to consumer brands all use the bank’s platform to “radically improve” the way consumers and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access, manage and use their money.

The company bills itself as the only truly global platform in the embedded finance market, arguing many other embedded finance and BaaS providers are “just software layers sitting on top of legacy financial institutions.”

In the statement, CEO Nigel Verdon went as far as to compare Railbank’s role in the finance industry to iTunes’ place in the music industry.

“Too much of the current global financial services system is made up of aging legacy technology and operational processes, making it unnecessarily complicated, highly expensive and nearly impossible for innovators to create the ‘Spotify’ of financial services,” Verdon said.

Verdon made another comparison in a PYMNTS interview last year with Karen Webster, equating Railbank with a “utility” connected to traditional banks. Railbank’s application programming interface (API), Verdon said, lets users build an “own-branded debit card” — rather than a co-branded one — into their apps.

“Our proposition is that any business or brand can be a FinTech,” added Verdon, explaining that “we aim to be the infrastructure that they all run on top of, using our pieces of ‘Lego’ to build a use case that’s on top of mind.”