Online merchants can usually pay up to 8% of every sale on an item to companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Stripe — and those costs are usually passed to consumers. So-called ‘account-to-account’ or ‘A2A’ payments can cut transaction fees to below 1%, saving merchants and consumers quite a bit of cash. The difficulty has been in making it seamless for both merchants and customers.
Italian-origin startup Volume, which has now raised $6 million in a Seed round led by United Ventures, things it’s come up with the answer. It previously raised a pre-seed round of $2.4 million in 2022. Post funding round, the company now plans to obtain FCA regulation in the UK and expand internationally.
Small and medium-sized companies tend to be the ones most impacted by transactions performed over Visa and Mastercard. However, while A2A payments can eliminate these extra fees for small businesses, there’s been a slow adoption rate because of technical challenges, consumer loyalty to cards, and the need to offer services like refunds and multi-currency support.
Volume’s solution is to provide a one-click checkout via an embeddable widget in a site which is as easy to integrate as something like PayPal.
Simone Martinelli, founder and CEO of Volume, told TechCrunch: “Imagine a traditional payment company like MasterCard, Visa, Stripe, or Checkout.com. They charge between 2% and 8% on everything that we buy online. We want to change that. There are no more intermediaries… there is the simple movement of money from your bank account to the account of the merchant.”
So how is it that Volume has managed to break the mold on this issue?
“The missing bit is the user experience,” said Martinelli.
“You need to prompt the user for their account number and sort code. But we compressed it all into one click. So we’ve managed to solve the user interface. Nobody else is really looking at the user experience. We think we’ve built the ‘’Apple Pay’ of the account to account space,” he claimed.
Volume has a flat-rate pricing model and transactions are completed by its infrastructure partner, Yapily, and authentication comes via the user’s banking app.
The startup might just be onto a good run right now. A2A startup Fast collapsed after raising $150 million from Stripe and other investors. Meanwhile Kevin raised $65m from top global investors, ended up being declared insolvent this year.
In a statement, Paolo Gesess, founder and managing partner at United Ventures, said: “Volume’s ability to grow GMV by 163x over the past year validates the enormous opportunity ahead.”
Volume has also recently boosted its team, hiring Justin Sebok, formerly Head of Product at the Fintech Curve, Richard Frenken, formerly of iZettle, and Shannon Krishna from WorldRemit and Luno.
Also participating in the round was Fabrick, the open finance platform part of the Sella Group, and existing investors Firstminute Capital, SeedX and Haatch.
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