Together, these innovation-friendly payment service providers will support Weavr’s current closed-beta early adopters and enable a public launch later this year.

Weavr is a unique cloud-based platform that empowers innovators to design, build and test sophisticated digital payment flows and user experiences in days instead of months, at a cost of a few hundred pounds rather than tens of thousands.
Weavr's first partnerships make its game-changing open collaboration model possible and represent some of the most innovation-friendly players in Europe's payments ecosystem. Global Processing Services (GPS) is a card processor associated with many of Europe’s most successful fintechs, Paynetics is an e-money institution with a pan-European issuing and acquiring footprint, while Lithuania-based iDenfy is a full-featured and developer-friendly toolkit for KYC identity verification and anti-money laundering.

Alex Mifsud, Co-Founder and CEO, Weavr, said: “We are excited to welcome our first partners who, between them, will empower many digital startups, product managers and other innovators to create and run sophisticated and streamlined payments experiences for their customers in Europe.”

Joanne Dewar, CEO of Global Processing Services (GPS) added: “We’re thrilled to be supporting Weavr as they launch into the European fintech scene. Their dedication to creating bespoke, personalised experiences for customers is precisely the kind of technology we look to enable, and as leaders in the market we’re looking forward to supporting them in rolling out their virtual solutions.”

Antonian Martinova, CEO of Paynetics, said: “We are committed to supporting Weavr’s initiative to democratise program management and allow startups to go live in a very short period of time. We have made our end-to-end payment infrastructure available to shorten the time to market for innovative concepts, embracing and leveraging payment functionality and transaction data.”

Arunas Vismantas, Head of Marketing, iDenfy said: “We are thrilled to partner with Weavr and help out community of innovators to develop and launch financial products to market. Not only that we share their vision and passion, but we aim to build a lasting partnership that will help Weavr clients to succeed.”

McKinsey estimates that digital commerce payments volume in Europe will grow from $450bn in 2016 to $750bn in 2021, with the portion of non-card payments increasing from 40% to 55% in that period. With an increasing number of digital business models (pioneered by brands like Uber and Airbnb) relying on streamlined payments processes across multiple parties and deep into the supply chain, there is a growing demand for payment models that go beyond the established e-commerce checkout. These payment models are not available off-the-shelf from established e-commerce payments providers, so digital innovators have to build their own at a huge expense. Even for simple custom payment solutions, such as prepaid card programmes, it can take over nine months and cost tens of thousands of pounds before making the first transaction.

Weavr’s first payment models will focus on making virtual cards more accessible to innovators, along with all the capabilities needed to design and build virtual card-based payments solutions, from funding cards to performing customer due diligence and making transfers. Once a payment solution is designed, built and tested on Weavr's unique cloud-based platform, Weavr matches the services required to run it with payment providers. By radically reducing the cost and time to market for virtual card solutions, Weavr empowers innovators to exploit the full potential of this versatile payment instrument — for the first time ever.