It’s difficult to imagine the world without payment technology. These days, we all use many of its forms on a regular basis: contactless payments, online wallets, money transfers, credit cards, and so on—just to name a few. It’s an important part of our reality both in business and in our private lives.
Some companies try to make the world of payments more transparent and user-friendly. Because, as you may have noticed, even though the payment technology is omnipresent, it’s far from perfect.
We took a closer look at the UK’s top paytechs and picked 11 companies that help startups, enterprises, and individual users make safer and smoother transactions. If you wish to stay informed on the future of payments in the UK, read on!
1. GoCardless
When you run a business, you have to make a lot of hard decisions, and how you handle your payments is one of them. Finding an option that will work for you might be complicated and confusing. This is where GoCardless, the very first global app for recurring payments, can help.
GoCardless serves 50,000 clients ranging in size from small businesses to enterprises, and processes more than $13 billion in transactions every year. In 2020, the company raised $95 million to accelerate the funding in Open Banking, a technology that speeds up the cash flow by instant confirmation of payment and immediate visibility of one-off payments.
Using Open Banking is not only convenient both for customers and businesses but also helps minimize failed payments and reduce costs.
2. Ravelin
“Ravelin” is a term used in fortification architecture for a type of fortress designed to protect the weakest points of the city gates. Having this in mind, could there be a better name for a fraud prevention company?
The UK-based firm has been trusted by many global giants, including Glovo, Flixbus, and Booking, and its portfolio continues growing. Ravelin offers two main products for their clients: fraud solutions and payment authentications.
The company’s data scientists help businesses analyze numbers to make smarter choices by recognizing fraud threats more effectively and maximize the success of remittances by optimizing payment routing. You can find out how Ravelin describes what it does in one of their blog posts.
3. Form3
Simplicity is better. That’s the motto behind Form3, a UK paytech company specializing in solutions for financial institutions, such as banks and regulated fintechs.
Form3 provides a cloud-based platform that enables a complete payment service through a single API. They offer it for different kinds of transfers, including SEPA, SWIFT, FSP, as well as other payment forms.
The company’s end-to-end payments service allows its clients to focus more on serving their customers’ needs and less on managing payment infrastructure, proving that payment technology operations can be advanced yet smooth.
4. Trust Payments
Launched in 2019, Trust Payments helps SMEs and enterprises optimize their sales and customer experience through facilitating speedy and seamless payments. The company’s services cover customer journeys step by step, from creating faster routes to digital payments to choosing POS and payment security.
Daniel Holden, CEO of Trust Payments, was recently listed as one of 50 Global Leaders who made a positive change in the world by facilitating safe payments at a time when many small companies had to undergo their first digital transformation. A short video on 50 Global Leaders’ site explains in more detail what Trust Payments does as a company.
5. Railsbank
Money on its own won’t make the world a better place—but making finance more inclusive is a great step toward this goal.
This thinking appears to be shared by Railsbank, a UK paytech specializing in providing APIs for banking. The company offers innovative solutions in the Banking as a Platform (BaaP) and Financial Service as a Platform (FSaP) sectors. Recently, Railsbank has raised $70 million in new equity funding and plans to spend it on further growth.
Railsbank claims that its goal is to make embedding finance into apps and customer journeys “as easy as the drag and drop feature,” and helps clients build their first prototype in less than two hours.
6. Primer
Primer was founded as recently as 2020, but it’s already getting the industry’s attention. It appeared on the Forbes 100 Cloud 2021 Rising Star ranking and got mentioned in The Fintech Times as well as many other publications (you can follow their LinkedIn profile to keep up to date).
The company offers an open automation platform for payments that enables you to build what they call “the best checkout experience on the planet.” It’s definitely worth keeping your eyes on them if you’re interested in finding out how to grow your business and improve your customers’ satisfaction.
7. Yoello
Yoello is a multi-award-winning paytech focused on the hospitality sector that provides solutions for mobile ordering. Using its system, all payments can be made by a mobile device, without the need for human interaction—exactly what the world has needed throughout the past year and a half.
Yoello’s aim is to disrupt the existing payment system by using the open banking legislation (PSD2) to remove the need for middlemen, as well as bring merchants and customers closer together as a result.
Additionally, Yoello’s website is packed with resources on the UK’s hospitality market and food services, for instance a guide to improve table service efficiency, the future of food service, or more general advice on how to rebuild your business in 2021.
8. Flux Systems
Ditch the paper, save the planet! Every day, unimaginable amounts of receipts are being printed and wasted. Using an example to paint the picture for you, in the UK alone, 112 billion are printed each year, which produces 28,000 tons of CO2. For this single purpose, 200,000 trees are cut down and 1,600,000,000 liters of water are used.
The majority of receipts are never looked at and almost immediately thrown away. Also importantly, they’re not suitable for recycling.
Having noticed this problem, Flux Systems made it their mission to reduce waste by sending receipts and loyalty points directly to the buyers’ smartphones, so there’s no need to print them on paper.
Flex Systems also does its part by educating on the carbon footprint of everyday payments and launching the Paperless Pledge, a commitment from retailers to make the printing of paper receipts optional. If the cause is important to you, you can get involved by signing a petition to UK supermarkets on the Beat the Receipt website.
9. Tymit
Credit cards and store loans can be a bit vague. Hidden costs, minimum payment amounts, confusing rules… It all leads to trust issues with financial providers and unhappy customers. This is exactly what Tymit aims to prevent. In their manifesto, the company points out what fairer credit cards should be like, with all costs shown upfront, a clear repayment plan, and no hidden fees.
Another thing that makes Tymit great is the company’s approach to sustainability. This year, for instance, Tymit announced that it’s become carbon-neutral. This is what we call a paytech of the future!
10. Cybertonica
During the last year, the change of purchasing patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase of internet fraud by up to 70%. Cybertonica compares the statistic to the virus itself and offers their customers the strongest remedy on the market.
The company prevents fraud and monitors risks to create secured authentication and smooth user journeys with the help of advanced machine learning models. It claims that the service can increase a company’s revenue by up to 25%, as well as help fight off bot attacks, account takeovers, basket drops-off, and much more.
11. Taptap Send
Nowadays, most transcontinental transfers are expensive and slow. It can take up to a couple of days for a financial operation to be completed and the final cost can be prohibitively high depending on the location and the amount transferred. The goal of Taptap Send is simple: to reduce the costs of sending money to Asia and Africa.
As a result, Taptap Send helps democratize the remittance sector, dominated by big service providers, to support people from underserved markets. Notably, Taptap Send is already achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal for 2030 of lowering cross-border remittance costs.
Final thoughts on noteworthy UK paytech companies
Undoubtedly, payments are an important part of everyone’s day-to-day life, whether you’re a consumer purchasing goods and services or you work for a large enterprise that produces them. The 11 UK paytechs we’ve listed above are living proof that technology is a powerful tool that can change the world for the better.
We hope you will draw some inspiration from their work, the tech solutions they implement, and, most of all, the courage to do things differently in a sector that has long been stagnant and overregulated.
And if you, too, want to make a difference by creating groundbreaking projects and need a tech partner to support you, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ll gladly help you out.
For further inspiration, feel free to check out some of the other articles on fintech available on our blog:
