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Volume, an online checkout startup that uses open banking mandated variable recurring payments to enable account-to-account payments for online merchants, has closed a pre-seed round of $2.4 million.
The oversubscribed round was led by firstminute Capital and joined by SeedX and Haatch Ventures. Other participants include angels Christian Faes (LendInvest), Russ Carroll (ex-Klarna) and executives from MADE.COM, Mastercard, Visa and American Express.
Founded by fintech veterans Simone Martinelli and Krzysztof Tarnawski – who have spent the last 10 years working at Level39, Mastercard, HSBC and WorldRemit – Volume aims to dislodge card-based payments in favour of low-cost A2A payments at the online checkout.
Using open banking rails provided by its infrastructure partner Yapily, Volume detects the preferred bank shoppers pay with and relays them to a biometric security check in their banking app in order to finalise the purchase. The end-to-end payment process takes less than one second, making it five times faster than conventional e-commerce payments, says the firm.
Says Martinelli: “Instead of yet another one-click checkout, Volume is building the world’s first-ever transparent checkout. Ecommerce has a ‘hidden tax’ in the form of payment commissions to cards and ewallets, and consumers don’t know this ultimately impacts on the prices they pay. We want to finally bring transparency to this enormous market and kill all hidden fees. What Transferwise did for cross-border payments, we’ll do for online payments. We estimate that if every merchant were to implement our solution, the ecommerce industry could save $800 billion in fees.”
He says the startup has already onboarded more than 50 merchants across retail, food delivery and digital marketplaces in the UK and will use the new funding to expand its UK business, before it looks towards the rest of Europe and North America.
Financial Services
