Welcome, Rapyd!
Today Rapyd announced a $300M round at a $2.5B valuation led by our friends at Coatue. We’re excited to welcome Arik Shtilman and the entire Rapyd team to the Spark family and back them on the journey of building the world’s most comprehensive Fintech platform for cross boarder payment collection, disbursement, card issuing and fraud tools.
Businesses are more global today than ever and yet payments as an industry remains incredibly local with a long tail of payment schemes and rails dominating various countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Card volumes (Visa + Mastercard) as a percentage of GDP drastically vary across different regions: 27% in the U.S, 12% in LatAm, 11% in APAC and 15% in the EU. The difference lies in the persistence of cash (87% of transactions in Argentina for example, 74% in Brazil, 89% in India and 96% in Indonesia) as well as the rise of alternative payment methods such as WeChat and AliPay in China, PayTm in India and PagSeguro in Brazil. Clearly as a business, relying on just the Visa + Mastercard network for payment acceptance and ignoring the regional alternative payment methods is a futile strategy — more payment methods means higher conversion rates, higher conversion means more revenues — when conducting business in countries outside of the U.S.
Rapyd has built a network of 900+ payment types across 100+ countries by establishing and maintaining integrations with regional networks across APAC, Europe, North America and LATAM. Rapyd exposes its network to developers and businesses through a set of easy-to-use APIs that enable: (i) collection of funds from major card networks, APMs, cash and e-wallets (ii) global disbursement of funds as well as (iii) card issuing.
In many ways, Rapyd is building the AWS of global payments. Without Rapyd, businesses looking to conduct cross-border commerce or disbursements would have to integrate with the few dominant local payment providers in each country, one-by-one, as well as banks, a host of local entities and compliance vendors just to start — and further manage this complex web on an ongoing basis. Take large international marketplaces as an example, these companies have built vast in-house payments teams that manage integrations and payments operations with 200+ global payment methods — clearly most companies do not have the talent or resources to embark on this journey on their own. Rapyd has created an elegant, API-first solution that abstracts the complexity of country-by-country collections and disbursements — and removes the barrier for businesses of all sizes to engage in cross border commerce and operations. In addition to its developer facing tools and APIs, e-commerce companies of all sizes can unlock international payments with Rapyd through plugins in Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce.
Rapyd is growing fast and in just a few years has become one of the few scaled developer-friendly platforms that unlocks payment collection and disbursement globally (a $200T+ industry by volume). Rapyd has 5,000 customers today and is adding 500 new clients weekly(!) For those of you who are as fascinated as we are at Spark by the evolving landscape of the global payments industry → Rapyd Careers.
