Barclays Bank has joined Angel Co-Fund and individual investors in a $5 million funding round for Form3, a provider of an API-based single point of access to the full universe of payment schemes.
The UK-based firm currently offers offer clients real-time and interbank payments processing through UK Faster Payments, Bacs, Chaps, Sepa and Swift.
The startup says it will use the funding to support growth within the challenger bank and fintech community and to expand geographically across Europe and North America. Sepa real-time services will come onstream in November and US instant payments from 2018.
Michael Mueller, CEO, at Form3 has 25-years experience in the banking industry, including senior roles at deutsche Bank and Barclays. He says: “Our clients quickly see the benefits of our cloud-native platform, often starting with a single payment type to improve their client proposition. There is no roll-out of complex projects with big teams and monolithic payment hubs, gateways, integrations etc. Clients simply subscribe to a payment service and we take care of the rest. A low-cost setup and pay as you go commercial model for the first time, makes leading edge payment capability accessible economically for small or very high volumes users."
Form3's board is composed of some of the great and good from old-time City firms, including chairman Tom Kozlowski, the founder of City Practitioners, Geoff Chapman, David Little, Kevin Brown and Maurice Cleaves.
Dan Roberts, managing director at Barclays describes Form3 as an enabler for positive change in the payments landscape.
"Form3 has rapidly deployed services to be a significant challenger to current technology options," he says. "We view the emerging payments-as-a-service model as complementary to our existing capabilities, offering clients further choice. We look forward to working with Form3 as they build out their model."