Mazepay helps medium and large-scale enterprises across the continent deal with the long-tail spend problems that arise from having to manage thousands of suppliers and tens of thousands of small invoices. This is often an extremely time consuming and archaic process that requires authorisation and sign-off from multiple stakeholders, and can lead to costly errors being made. Despite these pain points, B2B payments are expected to grow to $200 trillion by 2028, 5 times the volume of B2C payments, according to a report from Goldman Sachs.

The granting of the licence by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority, which allows Mazepay to handle its customers’ funds, handle supplier connections, and pay invoices directly, adds further legitimacy to the platform, and demonstrates to customers, regulators and potential partners that it is operationally responsible and is compliant with financial regulations.

Founded in 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark, by CEO Søren Aabel Hammer, COO Dan Kortegaard Nielsen, and CTO Thomas Dragsbæk, Mazepay’s vision is to empower corporations and their employees to easily manage all of their B2B spending within a trusted and compliant global ecosystem. Underpinning this vision is Mazepay’s next-generation SaaS technology, which by automating B2B purchasing and payments makes them as simple and seamless as B2C transactions.

Mazepay counts the likes of Advania, Better Collective, Configit, and Sweco as customers, and has partnered with SEB, Nordea, AirPlus and most notably, Mastercard, with over 70 banks globally connected with the Mastercard ICCP (In Control Commercial Payments) solution that Mazepay has integrated with.

The partnership with Mastercard enables a new bank to go live on the Mazepay platform within 30 days, with this rapid turnaround contributing to the number of transactions on the Mazepay platform doubling every quarter for the last three quarters. Through these strategic partnerships with global and regional banks and financial organisations, which introduce the solution to their own customers, Mazepay is ensuring the global scalability of its fintech solution. This has so far enabled Mazepay to simplify B2B payments for customers in 21 countries across 5 continents. Due to increased global uncertainty, caused by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising inflation and supply chain disruption, Mazepay’s solution has never been more critical for enterprises, which have an urgent need to create transparency of spend, cut costs and reduce supplier risks.

Søren Aabel Hammer, Founder and CEO of Mazepay, comments: “When enterprises onboard and maintain long-tail suppliers within their own complicated legacy systems, the cost and resources required to operate increases exponentially as complexity grows. This is exactly the problem that we at Mazepay are solving. The licence granted by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority adds further legitimacy to our platform and means we can begin to operate as a payments institution in Europe. Our solution matched with the license will act as a springboard as, in the future, we look to further expand globally and add a number of additional features and offerings to remove the needless complexity and cost out of corporate spending.”

Mazepay, which employs a team of 26 people, spanning 10 nationalities, has raised €2M to-date, with London-based VC firm Outward VC leading its latest seed round in 2021.

Kevin Chong, Co-Head of Outward VC, comments: “B2B payments are compliance heavy, manual and generally an archaic experience compared to B2C payments, presenting a major opportunity for Mazepay to streamline and automate the process. The issuing of the payments institute licence is a critical step for Mazepay to deliver a transformative B2B payments experience for its customers.”