The establishment of a New York office follows Fidel’s expansion to Canada and the Nordics in 2019.

Fidel’s APIs provide easy access to real-time transaction data from Visa, Mastercard and American Express. It has appointed Patrick Nealon as Vice President of Strategy to support its US growth initiatives. Patrick joins the team from American Express Ventures, where he focused on investments in and partnerships with startups. Previously, he was a member of the Corporate Strategy team at Visa in San Francisco.

Fidel has decided to expand to the US due to the high level of interest and growth in using card payment infrastructure to personalise customer experiences, enhance financial services and streamline business operations. Fidel will initially partner with businesses including Beyond, BAMit, giveback2schools and Twism.

By improving connectivity with the payment networks, Fidel enables businesses to build services on top of credit and debit cards. Using these developer tools, Fidel customers can quickly develop personalised experiences around loyalty, digital receipts, and a host of other use cases. For example, Fidel is working with Beyond in the US to support its ‘Chip-In’ program. Chip-In connects nonprofit supporters with local companies to raise money. A percentage of the value of card purchases made at participating businesses by Chip-In users is automatically donated to local causes.

Dev Subrata, CEO and Founder of Fidel, said: “We decided to accelerate our plans to expand to the US due to the surge in demand for our services in the last few months. US businesses are increasingly looking at how they can use payment data to drive engagement by providing new services and experiences. This, together with the size of the US market, made it a natural choice for our third international office.”

“Companies such as Beyond, Twisim, giveback2schools and BAMit are great examples of innovative companies that recognise the great change that is going on in fintech and the opportunity it presents to grow their business.”

Said Bob Carr, CEO of Beyond: “At Beyond, our mission is to provide small business owners the solutions they need to succeed. We launched the Chip-In program as a way of helping to restart local economies across America and support the #ShopLocal movement. Fidel’s API made it easy for us to access real-time payment data from the card networks, enabling consumers with a seamless way of earning rewards simply by using their credit or debit card.”

Patrick Nealon, Vice President of Strategy at Fidel, said: “'There is a massive opportunity for Fidel to meet demand from American firms keen to use our API. The size and dynamics of the US market make the States a great destination for European fintechs as well. I'm excited to support the progress already made in North America by my Canadian colleagues and I look forward to seeing what our partners will build on top of our API.

In Canada, Fidel powers applications such as dipp - a local offers program - and Butter - a subscription services platform.

Said Nealon: “We’re also delighted to work with our partner card networks. Fidel looks forward to enabling the creation of additional products and services that supercharge the value of payment cards and further accelerate digital payments.”