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We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid. Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize: The two fintech startups have recently grown (much) more competitive.
If things weren’t turbulent enough, another startup has very publicly emerged as a formidable competitor to StripeFinix.
Now, Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia. In an unusual twist, Sequoia just 1 month later walked away from the deal in which it reportedly wrote the self-described payments infrastructure company a $21 million check. As TC’s Connie Loizos reported at the time, Finix told employees that soon after issuing its check, Sequoia concluded that Finix competes too directly with Stripe, the payments company that represented one of Sequoia’s biggest private holdings and that in turn counted Sequoia as one of its biggest outside investors.
Fast-forward to last week. Finix announced that it was becoming a payments facilitator, in addition to enabling other companies to facilitate payments. This move puts it in direct competition with Stripe, something that CEO and co-founder Richie Serna is not shy about admitting.
In an interview this past week, Serna elaborated by noting that Finix indeed started out to build software that gave any software company a way to become their own payment facilitator.
“We were building technology that would take a three-year in-house build by dozens of engineers, with tens of millions of dollars of technical R&D and investment, and taking that down to a number of months by getting developer-friendly APIs to start monetizing their payments,” he said. “That was our biggest core offering. What we’ve done now is become the payments facilitator ourselves, so that we can not only provide the payments, but also all the back office requirements and compliance certifications, so that our customers can get up and running in a matter of days, rather than months.”
He says the move gives Finix the ability to work with companies and software platforms who have $0 in processing volume all the way up to companies with billions of dollars in processing volume.
“This allows these customers to get a better product experience and faster speed to market, and allows us to take on those non-technical aspects of rolling out and monetizing, and getting payments,” Serna added.
You see, historically, companies needed to hit a certain volume threshold before Finix could work with them. But now, according to Serna, they can start working with them in their earliest states.
“Customers can start working with us from day one, use finance APIs, and when they’re ready to take on …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/29/finix-goes-head-to-head-with-fintech-stripe/