Rewiring global finance with open APIs

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO & CO-Founder

8 Apr 2021

Our Series D fundraise will help us put finance at the fingertips of digital innovators everywhere.

Over the past decade, digital commerce has exploded. The global pandemic has accelerated this trend, with millions of businesses and consumers transacting online out of necessity. This shift is changing finance as we know it, yet digital payments and banking infrastructure haven’t changed for decades.Open banking has given us the opportunity to rewire global finance using modern APIs and open architecture – opening up access to financial data and creating new ways to pay and verify identity. Our mission at TrueLayer is to open up finance. We’re building an open banking network that brings together payments, data and identity to redefine how people spend, save and transact online. We’re doing this in a way that puts customers at the centre, enabling the creators, the doers and the builders in every industry to reimagine finance and improve the fabric of our society. Today we announced that we have raised $70 million in Series D funding to help us accelerate the roll-out of our flagship open banking network and solve deeper, more complex problems for our customers.This investment round was led by Addition and we welcome onboard Lee Fixel and his team. Several new investors such as Visionaries Club, Surojit Chatterjee (CPO Coinbase), Zack Kanter (CEO Stedi), Daniel Graf (ex-Uber, Google, Twitter) and David Avgi (ex-CEO SafeCharge, CEO UniPaaS) joined the round along with all our major existing investors.

Finance is opening up

Luca and I founded TrueLayer in 2016 when open banking was just getting started. Today, there are more than 3 million users in the UK and at the current growth rate, 60% of the UK’s population will be using open banking by the end of 2023. When merchants offer open banking as a payment option, 1 in 3 customers choose it. Europe is only 6-12 months behind and open banking regulations have emerged or are emerging all around the world, including Australia, Brazil and Japan. The global value of open banking is predicted to reach $43bn in the next five years. It’s a joy to see our vision coming alive and to see open banking quickly becoming a new normal.We now process more than half of the open banking volume in the UK, Ireland and Spain and over the past 12 months, we’ve expanded across 12 markets, growing by 600x. More importantly, we’ve earned the trust of hundreds of customers that are rethinking how finance should work, in areas like digital banking, ecommerce, trading, investment, crypto and remittance – from Revolut and Nutmeg to Trading 212, Stake and Payoneer.

The road ahead

We’ll be launching new open banking based capabilities this year and we’ll continue to expand our network, adding broader and deeper connectivity across Europe and beyond.We believe that open banking is reaching maturity in several markets and the next phase is about solving bigger, more complex problems for our customers – layering value on top of the raw infrastructure. You’ll see us building more and more in this direction. Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to our team, our customers, our partners and of course our investors, for your continued support. We’re incredibly excited to continue on this journey with you, opening up finance for communities everywhere.

Written by

Francesco Simoneschi

CEO & CO-Founder

Francesco focuses on product and business strategy, building partnerships with the world’s leading financial intuitions. Over the past decade, Francesco has founded, managed and grown a number of successful tech companies in the US and Europe.