Payall lands $10M in a16z-led seed round to help banks facilitate more cross-border payments
Summary
When they want to offer merchants the ability to accept cards, they sign up with an acquiring processor.But when it comes to cross-border payments and international fund transfers generally, banks have had far fewer choices, and to industry veteran Gary Palmer, that spelled opportunity.He founded Payall, a cross-border processor for regulated banks, in 2018. Weve built the UI and APIs that make it easy.That in turn allows those businesses to automate the process.Our mission is really to protect the safety and soundness of cross-border payments. And I cant highlight that enough, because this category is considered high risk by regulators and by compliance officers, Palmer told TechCrunch.Indeed, with the COVID-19 pandemic fueling more remote work globally, the need to provide cross-border payments for business and individual clients has never been as pressing for banks.And that is exactly what drew Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Anish Acharya to lead Payalls new $10 million seed round with an $8 million contribution.The firm came across the problem in its work around default global, in that banks really want to facilitate more cross-border money movement especially as the world is increasingly global.Weve been scouring the Earth, and ran into Gary because he was one of the few people that have real experience building payment processors, Acharya told TechCrunch. Palmer then went on to co-found Adaptive Payments, which sold to Mastercard in 2015.He was inspired to start Payall after concluding that there had been essentially no innovation, or marginal innovation, in the cross-border payments space in over 50 years.This began to excite me because unlike prepay, which was a new category and a new product, I had a chance to address a category that was $100 to $150 trillion in volume that was highly concentrated among a few banks, Palmer told TechCrunch. And it occurred to me that I should apply my 20 years of experience of working with financial institutions to changing the way cross-border payments and international funds transfer work.Additional participants in the seed funding round were Motivate VC along with PS27 Ventures and Bridgeport Partners, with SAFE conversions from RRE Ventures and Transcard.