Paysend Raises $65 Million and Teams With TelevisaUnivision

Money transfer FinTech Paysend has raised $65 million in a new funding round.

The round, announced Wednesday (Nov. 29), follows Paysend’s recent partnership with Mastercard, which allows the company to enhance cross-border payments for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) through its Open Payments Network (OPN).

“This significant investment is a testament to the strength of Paysend’s vision: to build the best-in-class cross-borders solution for businesses and consumers, making money transfer simple for everyone,” Ronnie Millar, Paysend’s co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. 

In addition to the funding, the U.K.-based Paysend announced a partnership with TelevisaUnivision, the world’s largest Spanish language media company. This collaboration will target the USA-Latin America money-transfer corridors, and will see Paysend’s advertising featured on TelevisaUnivision’s network over the next three years.

This has been a busy year for Paysend working with other companies. In addition to the above-mentioned partnerships, the company also teamed with Western Union on cross-border money transfer services.

Announced in October, this collaboration is designed to provide seamless and efficient cross-border money transfer capabilities to customers using Western Union’s digital platform, and offers an additional direct-to-card payout option, enabling Western Union customers to send funds directly to Visa and Mastercard debit cards.

Paysend also recently joined forces with Visa. As PYMNTS wrote in September, one of the key advantages of the partnership is the real-time nature of the transactions, made possible through Visa Direct — Visa’s real-time money movement network — which connects 3.4 billion card credentials worldwide in seconds.

Abdul Abdulkerimov, executive chairman and co-founder of Paysend, told PYMNTS that the ability to send money in real-time to cards has substantially improved the cross-border money transfer experience for consumers around the globe.

Citing instant messaging service WhatsApp as an example, Abdulkerimov said people have “been used to receiving information immediately but [until now] money was not playing that game.” Addressing this expectation in the money movement sector is a “game changer” when it comes to costs and service speed, he added.

Beyond that, Abdulkerimov said the Paysend-Visa collaboration also involves technologies that foster financial inclusion for millions of unbanked and underserved customers, especially those in cash-heavy economies.

“We’re working together to ensure that we’re not just focusing on those who already have a card or a bank account, but also those who are not yet benefiting from the financial system,” he told PYMNTS.