By Riley Kaminer
If you’ve ever had to make a cross-border payment, you’ll know what a headache it can be. Now imagine doing that at scale and at the corporate level. Not fun.
Seasoned payments vet Gary Palmer understood this problem first-hand, through working in the industry for upwards of 20 years. He has had multiple successful exits over the years, including the sale of a prepaid card processor for $250 million and the sale of another company to Mastercard. It was these experiences that ultimately led Palmer to found Miami-based startup Payall in 2018.
Today, Payall announced that it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with additional participation from investors including Motivate VC, PS27 Ventures, and Bridgeport Partners. This funding is in addition to the $8.2 million Payall has raised in pre-seed and SAFE funding.
Andreessen Horowitz GP Anish Acharya, who co-leads the VC’s fintech group, told TechCrunch that Palmer’s expertise in the space was what attracted the investor to Payall.
“We’ve been scouring the Earth, and ran into Gary because he was one of the few people that have real experience building payment processors,” Acharya said.
“One of the big things that we learned is that a lot of it is actually a compliance problem, more than a movement of money problem, when it comes to cross border payments,” Acharya continued. “And Gary shared the same thesis.”
The world is becoming more digital and more global on a daily basis. The problem is that the rails running international financial markets were not set up for this so-called ‘default-global’ environment. But according to Palmer, there has been “essentially no innovation, or marginal innovation, in the cross-border payments space in over 50 years.”
While many similar companies compete with banks, Payall differentiates itself by working alongside banks – selling them white-labeled software.
Acharya underscored the value of this partnership-based approach. “There are places where internet companies are better and there are places where banks are set up to succeed,” he said. “And when it comes to serving a lot of smaller customers – especially overseas – they already have the relationship. So it’s really a matter of helping them offer these capabilities, instead of necessarily competing with them.”
Payall’s turnkey platform provides its customers with more insights into who exactly is sending and receiving these funds, helping to mitigate the risk of individual transactions. Recipients can receive payments through digital wallets, prepaid cards, or bank accounts. The startup asserts that its platform can process cross-border payments more quickly and effectively than traditional approaches.
“We want to make sure that the product is inclusive – and that banks can deliver money efficiently to anybody on the planet, even if they don’t have a bank account, and in near real time and at a fraction of the cost of the normal cross-border product through a bank,” Palmer told TechCrunch.
South Florida continues to be a hub for fintech innovators. Just this week, MAJORITY raised a $37.5 million Series B to expand its migrant-focused neobank platform. Earlier this month, business financing startup Boopos landed a $58M Series A. And of course, Miami is home to a wide array of top fintechs, including Novo, YellowPepper, Pipe, and Technisys – just to name a few.
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