Dive Brief:
- Conduit, which incorporates stablecoins into its cross-border payments network, closed on a $36 million haul from investors this week, the Boston-based company said in a Wednesday press release. The venture capital firms Dragonfly and Altos Ventures led the fundraising round.
- Palla, which also operates a cross-border payments platform, raised $14.5 million from Revolution Ventures, Y Combinator, Meta Fund and other investors, according to its Wednesday press release.
- The new funding for the startups, which both offer real-time payments, is expected to help each of them expand into new geographic markets and add more services, their separate press releases said.
Dive Insight:
Cross-border payments are notoriously slow, complicated and expensive, but recent advances in digital payments are allowing a slew of nascent fintechs to offer alternative international payment tools. They aim to challenge legacy players in that arena, such as Swift, MoneyGram, PayPal and Western Union.
Conduit “seamlessly” integrates stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to a stable value, with U.S. dollars and other countries’ local currencies to offer businesses, the company said in its release. The business aims to be an alternative to Belgium-based Swift, the dominant cross-border payments system.
Conduit is led by CEO Kirill Gertman, who is based in the Boston area, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The company was founded in 2021 and has about 100 clients, with support from 57 employees, the release said. While Conduit competes with Swift, short for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, it also connects to that network, as well as other rails, including ACH and Fedwire, plus local currency systems in other countries.
Currently, Conduit services are available in the U.K., as well as other parts of Europe, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, and Kenya, among others. It expects to reach further into Asia and Mexico in the future, per the release.
Miami-based Palla, which was founded a year earlier in 2020, has developed a clientele of some 30 financial institutions and fintech distribution partners that incorporate the startup’s cross-border payments capabilities into their own offerings, per the press release. The company has raised about $15 million in total, a spokesperson for the startup said.
Palla enables its partners to embed instant international payments into their own digital channels by way of APIs, white-label apps and other embedded features, the release said. The company aims to add more partners to its lineup before the end of the year, with plans to expand in Latin America, the Caribbean and beyond those regions.
The company also expects to broaden existing payment pathways and open new ones for sending and receiving funds as it launches new product lines and money management tools.
“Our goal has always been to simplify and secure cross-border transfers, giving financial institutions the opportunity to make them faster, safer, and more user-friendly than ever before,” Palla CEO Enrique Perezalonso said in the release. “This investment will accelerate our growth and further our mission to make international payments seamless and accessible to everyone.”
Revolution Ventures, which led Palla’s funding round, has poured funding into other noteworthy fintech firms, including Trust & Will, Revolution Money by American Express, Policygenius’ Zinna, Rize by Fifth Third Bank and Hello Wallet by Morningstar, according to the investor’s website.
In addition to the capital infusion, Palla said David Golden, managing partner at Revolution Ventures, and Heidi Miller, former president of JPMorgan International, will join Palla’s board of directors, according to the press release.
The cross-border companies may face additional costs as they seek to expand. U.S. lawmakers are weighing whether to tax cross-border remittances.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a budget bill that would tax cross-border money transfers. The Senate hasn’t voted on the bill yet, but fintech groups, including Financial Technology Association, American Fintech Council and Electronic Transactions Association, have already decried the legislation.
