A high-growth UK payments FinTech start-up has opened a new office in Edinburgh to leverage the city’s burgeoning FinTech scene.
The expansion will enable the company to significantly grow its software engineering, customer support, risk and compliance, and finance teams. The firm recently completed its latest funding round, led by a leading digital venture builder, bringing the total investment in the company to £10.5 million since its formation in January 2016. This financial injection in Edinburgh is enhancing key additional capacity and capability to support the company’s significant growth.
The company’s accounts provide an alternative to bank accounts for business payments, making them faster, easier, and more reliable than legacy technology solutions. The new Edinburgh team will work to extend the current offering to existing and new customers in alternative lending, payments FinTech, payroll services, finance software providers, and marketplaces, as well as explore new markets. Additionally, the digital payments account, which automates and manages payments in real-time 24/7, will be enhanced with new features. These enhancements will provide additional integrated ways for customers to get paid, reconcile, and make payments instantly, with more functionality to be announced over the coming months.
Having conducted a review of various technology hubs across Europe, the firm chose Edinburgh for its excellent talent pool, supported by industry and government bodies such as FinTech Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, and its reputation as the UK’s second-largest financial services centre. Scotland has seen the number of people employed in the financial and related professional services industry grow by 6.6% from 151,000 to 161,000 in the past year. A recent review of global FinTech hubs by Deloitte highlighted the city for its thriving FinTech ecosystem. To meet its growth and product development targets, the company identified the need to at least double its technology team in 2018 and further in the coming years. Edinburgh is an ideal location as its developer population grew by 8% in the latter half of 2017, reaching nearly 20,000.
The CEO stated that building high-quality and scalable teams is critical to the company’s current and future growth. Following initial success, there was a need to scale, prompting the search for a location with a strong talent pool and pipeline. The advisory partner and chair of the firm acknowledged that the company solves a significant pain point by replacing outdated, slow, and unreliable manual payment processes with an efficient and manageable payments platform. The partner added that this is a crucial step on their growth journey and evidence of the growing demand for their solutions.
In the first two years, the company has processed £4.2 billion in business payments, with transaction volumes growing by an average of 11% month-on-month. With the opportunities presented by the new office in Edinburgh, the firm expects to double the size of its team over the last six months of the year, reaching over 100 employees across both its Edinburgh and London offices.
The strategic move to Edinburgh signifies the company’s commitment to leveraging the city’s talent and ecosystem to bolster its growth trajectory, while addressing key market needs with innovative payment solutions.