It is five long years since the UK introduced its “open banking” reforms promising that new technologies would help consumers and small businesses get a better deal from financial services. The reforms have taken time to deliver on that promise, but innovation is now gathering pace, courtesy of businesses such as Atoa Payments, which wants to cut high-charging Visa and Mastercard out of the payments loop.
Atoa, which is today announcing the completion of a $2.2 million pre-seed funding round, is squarely taking aim at the two payment giants. Every time a customer makes a payment on their debit card, the transaction proceeds across rails controlled by Visa and Mastercard, points out Sid Narayanan, one of three co-founders of the company. He and partners Cian O’Dowd and Arun Rajkumar, previously founded Singapore-based fintech, KlearCard, which was acquired last year by Validus.
“That means the…
