On EQT Ventures’ investment in Volt, building the global instant payments network
Today, Volt — the leading open payments gateway, has raised a $23.5 million Series A to fund expansion into new territories and build out its global instant payments footprint.
The investment round, the largest Series A on record for the Open Banking industry, was led by EQT Ventures. Existing investors Augmentum and Fuel Ventures also participated, alongside several angel investors with extensive payments industry experience and influence. These include: Robert Kraal as Chairman (co-founder of Adyen) and Gabriel de Montessus as Non-Executive Director (Group President at FIS Worldpay).
The world is experiencing a dramatic shift towards digital payments; e-commerce transactions alone are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2024. The pandemic has created an inflection point in the payments sector; faced with unprecedented online demand, merchants and PSPs are re-assessing the technical infrastructure that underpins their business.
At the same time how we move money is changing. Where historically we have relied on Visa and MasterCard as the backbone for global e-commerce, the future is different. At EQT Ventures we believe that account-based instant payments are set to dominate the global payments landscape, because they’re:
1) Faster: payments arrive instantly, no more waiting days or weeks for card processors to pay out.
2) Cheaper: no card or interchange fees (i.e no card acquirers, issuers or schemes involved), resulting in significantly lower transaction costs vs. other payment methods.
3) Safer: payments are authorised by the consumer with their bank, reducing fraud and chargebacks costs.
This is no longer a bold prediction, payment giants such as FIS expect account-based instant payments to be their main revenue stream by 2024. There are 58 countries rolling out their instant payment schemes, and across the globe, merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) are prioritising instant payments.
Enter Volt, building the global instant payments platform — an orchestration layer that unifies instant schemes around the world to a single point of access.
Volt has quietly and rapidly established itself as Europe’s leading open payments gateway. It offers seamless access to Open Banking payments in Europe, connecting over 5,000 banks across the UK and EU, and with this round they will expand further internationally.
Their unique operating model removes single point of failure, provides unrivalled reach and smart routing based on performance, conversion and reliability. It also, translates and operationalises the real-time payments infrastructure, creating a highly flexible and scalable solution, and delivering a unified experience for Merchants and Payment Service Providers.
In our first call with Tom, Jordan and Steffen we were immediately captivated by the combination of their merchant centricity, deep payments experience and bold global ambitions. They’ve built successful payments start-ups from scratch (IFX), led international expansion for the largest PSPs (Adyen) and recruited some of the world’s leading payment execs (PCN). Raw ingredients that together with their model puts them in a strong position to become the global category winner.
With this funding round, Volt will be accelerating its international expansion and product development. We’re incredibly excited and honoured to be joining Tom, Jordan and Steffen in their journey towards building the global instant payments network.
