London-based FinTech Railsbank, which offers digital banking services, is now closing in on unicorn status, Sky News reported Friday (Feb. 4).
The company also recently got in on some assets of Wirecard, the collapsed and fraud-ridden German payments company.
Railsbank is working on plans to raise around $100 million in new funding. Some of that deal will come down to help from FT Partners, the prolific FinTech-focused investment bank, according to the report.
According to sources, the fundraising would make Railsbank a unicorn — even with the public markets sell-off of tech stocks impacting valuations.
Last year, Railsbank co-founder Nigel Verdon said the business was “transforming the finance industry in the same way that Apple did to the music industry when they created iTunes,” and suggested at the time that Railsbank had a nearly $1 billion valuation.
In January, PYMNTS wrote about Railsbank’s foray into the buy now, pay later (BNPL) arena, noting that the company said this would help retailers keep more of the spoils.
See also: Finance Platform Railsbank Enters BNPL Arena
The BNPL solution would help retailers offer branded and fully integrated payments. Louisa Murray, chief operating officer for the company’s U.K. and European operations, said the solution lets the costumer see a company’s brand, rather than Railsbank’s.
Murray said one goal was to cut out distractions and let retailers maximize engagement with their users.
“Current BNPL providers brand their own offerings which take the customer away from the original retailer’s website and onto their own,” the U.K. company wrote on its blog last month. “Here they engage and nourish, meaning the original seller misses out on a wide range of marketing opportunities.”
Customers will be able to utilize the tool to split payments into a maximum of 36 installments. Retailers will be able to clean up their checkout flows, discover new opportunities for engagement during payment and repayment and link rewards accounts.
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NEW PYMNTS DATA: 70% OF BNPL USERS WOULD USE BANK INSTALLMENT OPTIONS, IF AVAILABLE
About: Seventy percent of BNPL users say they’d rather use installment plans offered by their banks — if only they were made available. PYMNTS’ Banking On Buy Now, Pay Later: Installment Payments And FIs’ Untapped Opportunity, surveyed more than 2,200 U.S. consumers to better understand how consumers view banks as BNPL providers in a sea of BNPL pure-plays.
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