Rapyd, a startup that converts international payments, announced a partnership with Visa this week to grow its card-issuing business.
“A major opportunity for us, and we’re seeing this around the world from a sheer use-case perspective, is card issuing,” said Marc Winitz, chief marketing officer at Rapyd. “Whether it’s physical or virtual, there’s an enormous number of use cases that are needed. Visa is a natural partner to help us do that.”
The startup helps companies accept payments in currencies around the world, and make payments to vendors and employees. Rapyd also helps customers accept different payment methods, including cash, cards, e-wallets and bank transfers.
The Visa partnership allows the London-based Rapyd to boost its cross-border reach with a global payments company. According to Winitz, this will help Rapyd connect disparate payments systems in markets around the world.
In addition to issuing cards, Rapyd will use Visa Direct, a real-time payments service that pushes funds to debit cards, to help customers make bank transfers. Winitz also said the company will take advantage of Visa’s tokenization capabilities. Rapyd plans to work with Visa globally. The Visa services will only be available in the U.K. to start and the company is working to expand Visa’s offerings to other markets, Winitz said.
Rapyd’s customers come from a variety of industries, including gig-economy platforms, e-commerce sellers, marketplaces, tech companies and large businesses. Uber, for instance, is one customer, but Winitz didn’t provide other examples. In March, the company launched Rapyd Checkout, a service that helps customers accept more than 500 payment types in over 100 countries.
See also: Rapyd Launches Local Payments Solution Rapyd Checkout
Rapyd white-labels its payment capabilities so customers can maintain their own branding, and the company earns money from fees charged to companies that embed its payment capabilities. In addition to its customers, Rapyd has a wide partner network that helps enable its payments. Partners include Green Dot and GrabPay, as well as Singaporean banks OCBC and DBS. The company raised $40 million in Series B funding in February, and an additional $100 million in October, bringing its total funding to $180 million since its founding in 2016.
Rapyd’s chief product officer, Helcio Nobre, joined the company last year after spending two years at Visa as a senior vice president of e-commerce and mobile payment products. Winitz didn’t provide specifics on Nobre’s role in this particular partnership, but he said Nobre is involved in the assessment of all Rapyd’s global partners.
Other companies are trying to help clients accept and issue a variety of payments. Adyen, for example, launched a card-issuing product in November that allows merchants to provide virtual or physical cards.
“This market will continue to grow as countries around the world move towards real-time payments directly between merchants and banks, and consumers embrace branded wallet applications that offer broader services to help manage their money,” Adam Valkin, a partner at General Catalyst, said previously in a statement.
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