UK-based open banking platform TrueLayer has closed its Series D investment round on $70m.
The round included investors such as Addition, Anthemis Group, Connect Ventures, Northzone, Temasek, Mouro Capital and Visionaries Club. Angel investors in the funding round included Zack Kanter, Surojit Chatterjee, Daniel Graf and David Avgi. To date, $142m has been invested into TrueLayer.
According to TrueLayer, the latest raise reflects the growing demand for its open banking-based services and marks another significant milestone for the company on its mission to open up finance.
TrueLayer claims the new funding will be used to fuel global expansion as well as accelerating the development of premium open-banking services. Furthermore, the capital will help drive an expansion in the firm’s engineering, product and commercial teams in order to meet increasing global demand.
TrueLayer provides a platform to build financial applications which connect to bank data, verify accounts, and access transactions in real-time. The business currently has locations in London, Berlin and Canberra.
Currently, the company’s API-first platform purportedly accounts for more than half of all open banking traffic in the UK, Ireland and Spain – managing billions of pounds in payments. It also supports services for some of Europe’s fastest-growing brands, such as Trading 212 and Revolut.
TrueLayer also has a ‘market-leading’ payment conversion rate of 22%, which OpenBanking UK claims is higher than other providers, and 40% higher than cards. In addition, merchants who offer TrueLayer as a payment method in their checkout claim they have found, on average, one in three consumers chose to pay via TrueLayer.
During the past year, TrueLayer has bolstered its services to spread across 12 European markets and has grown its payment volumes by 600% – welcoming new customers across trading and investment, eCommerce, digital banking, wealth management, crypto and iGaming.
The firm has also recently launched PayDirect, a platform that merges instant pay-in capabilities with instant pay-outs. This, TrueLayer claims, helps deliver a higher converting, lower fraud method for online payments.
TrueLayer CEO and co-founder Francesco Simoneschi said, “When Luca [Martinetti] and I started TrueLayer in 2016, we imagined open banking becoming a new digital channel for solving cost and complexities around payments, digital identity, credit data and much more. We wanted to open up this newly built infrastructure to many businesses and consumers.
“It is such a joy to see our vision coming alive and open banking based payments quickly becoming the new normal.”
TrueLayer is rapidly expanding as demand for its open banking platform increases, largely driven by consumer demand for digital financial services that work better for them, and give them more control over their financial lives.
Martinetti added, “We have achieved this milestone thanks to the hard work of our stellar team. Bringing radical new products into the hands of consumers and businesses is incredibly exciting. This new financial network we are building on top of open architectures has massive long-term implications for the whole fintech ecosystem and we won’t compromise our vision in any way.”
Addition founder Lee Fixel also commented, “TrueLayer is ideally positioned to benefit from the trends shaping the future of financial services as more and more companies embed digitally native payments into their platforms. We look forward to supporting the TrueLayer team as they scale their offering and drive continued innovation.”
Earlier this year, TrueLayer entered into a partnership with challenger bank Monzo to protect customers using new payment methods to remit money when gambling. The two companies have launched a pilot scheme using open banking to block payment transactions being made to gambling operators.
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