British fintech startup Payrow seeks £10mn in second investment round

Payrow, a new British fintech, is launching its business banking service focused on the growing class of British remote workers, consultants, freelance talent and eCommerce entrepreneurs. The platform offers a wide range of financial services and a convenient, reliable and affordable ecosystem for its users.

Payrow’s features will include multi-currency accounts in 25 currencies, an FX conversion engine with interbank rates and the ability to manage invoices and set up automated follow-ups to improve the speed of payments and business expenses.

Payrow developers have built a microservice technology stack, where almost every payment instrument looks like a standalone service. All data, caches, and interfaces are self-managed, which makes it easy to scale the product and make updates to the system without affecting the operation of other services. This kind of microservice architecture makes Payrow more flexible and responsive to the needs of its clientele, compared to banks and PSPs built on monolithic systems.

For its online banking services, Payrow implemented an anti-fraud system based on a graph database, which gives clients the opportunity to see a complete picture of transactions and relationships between counterparties, while also preventing fraud and chargebacks. Additionally, a new, 3D secure v.2 protocol is being rolled out to improve the security of payments and provide cardholders with a fast, simple and convenient authentication process.

The fintech was launched in London in 2019 and raised 2.9 million euros during its first investment round. In the subsequent two and a half years, Payrow has put together a team of specialists with experience from the world’s largest IT companies, developed a vision of the final product and successfully passed through several stages of platform testing. At the moment, Payrow is in the “realtest” stage, in which the payment system is being tested by a closed group of British companies from different business sectors.

Payrow’s next step in development will be the issuance of a payment card and the release of its Acquiring feature, which will allow clients to accept cashless payments with their cards and via a contactless payment system.