As Modulr enters its tenth year, I’ve been reflecting on what it really takes to build a payments business that lasts. Not just one that grows quickly, but one that creates real value for customers over time, earns trust and scales effectively. In fintech, that’s harder than it sounds.
In 2025, Modulr delivered net profit on a full-year basis, a milestone that every scale-up aspires to achieve. For us, it validates the choices we've made: focusing relentlessly on solving real customer problems and investing deeply in the payments technology and expertise required to do that at scale. As we enter our next decade with continued commercial growth, a clear strategy, and an increasingly global footprint, this achievement gives us the foundation to accelerate.
Why broken payments still hold businesses back
When we started Modulr nearly ten years ago, our belief was simple: the way money moves through businesses was broken. Payments were slow, manual, fragmented, and disconnected from the systems businesses relied on to operate.
That problem hasn’t gone away. In fact, as businesses have become more digital and more global, the cost of broken payments has only increased.
Our recent research with 250 UK accountants and bookkeepers shows that broken payment workflows remain a major drag on productivity, with 46% spending more than three hours a week reconciling payments. Take one of our accounting customers – by embedding Modulr’s payments automation directly into their platform, they’ve reduced the time it takes their customers to make payroll by up to 90%.
In sectors like travel, the challenge is even more acute, where payment complexity directly affects margins, liquidity, and risk. Global virtual card transaction revenue in travel is forecast to grow from $26bn in 2023 to $113.8bn by 2028, yet 60% of US businesses have still not automated their virtual card processes. Instead, teams rely on manual issuance, reconciliation, and exception handling – processes that simply don’t scale.
Our response has been consistent: to build a payments automation platform that puts money movement directly into finance workflows.
Today, Modulr supports the full spectrum of business payments – from payroll, supplier and accounts payable payments, to spend management and payment collection. Each solution is designed to reduce manual effort and operational cost, introduce greater control that improves accuracy and reduces risk, and give finance teams the confidence to scale without adding complexity.
Investing deeply in critical payments technology
Today, Modulr processes more than £180bn in payments annually, supporting thousands of businesses globally.
From the outset, we made a deliberate decision to invest in critical payments technology rather than take shortcuts. In an industry where it’s often easier to build on top of multiple intermediaries, we chose a harder path: reducing complexity by owning and integrating directly into the payments ecosystem itself.
Modulr was one of the first non-bank institutions to become directly connected to the UK’s Faster Payments and Bacs schemes. That early investment gave us direct control over payment execution, resilience and performance, and removed dependencies that can introduce latency, failure points and operational risk. With the development of the Instant Payments Regulation, a similar path in Europe is imminent.
By investing early in direct scheme access, we’ve built a platform designed for reliability and long-term growth. It’s what allows us to deliver consistently high uptime, support complex payment use cases, and give our customers confidence that their money will move—securely and on time—every time.
The FIS partnership: opening the door to the US
There is no better example of this long-term strategy than the recent announcement of our partnership with FIS and our expansion into the United States – one of the proudest moments in the Modulr journey.
Being selected by FIS to power the payment execution layer of its Money Movement Hub is a testament to Modulr’s proven expertise in deeply integrating into complex payments ecosystems and the culmination of a significant amount of work by the whole team.
Together with FIS, we’re enabling banks in one of the world’s largest payment markets to gain access to FedNow, RTP, ACH and more through a single, modern interface.
Profitability in 2025: a defining moment
Hitting profitability in 2025 was a defining moment for Modulr and comes at a pivotal time for the industry. As businesses increasingly recognise that fragmented payment systems represent a strategic liability, demand for consolidation onto platforms that can handle complexity at scale has accelerated. Our path to profitability coincides with this market shift, not by accident, but by design.
For Modulr, profitability is not an endpoint. It’s a foundation. It gives us control over our destiny: the ability to invest in products for our customers, expand globally, and pursue strategic opportunities without compromising our principles or resilience.
Built to scale, focused on the future
Looking ahead, our ambition is bigger than ever.
We’re doubling down on the areas where payments are most complex and most critical, providing a single platform for automating how money moves into and out of businesses.
We’re also investing in the next generation of finance operations. Our teams are using AI to optimise the services we provide. The opportunity lies in integrating these capabilities safely and seamlessly into existing workflows – so businesses benefit from innovation without taking on additional complexity or risk. Our platform is designed to support that shift - securely, and at scale.
A decade later—and still getting started
Ten years ago, Modulr was an idea driven by frustration with how broken business payments were. Today, it’s a profitable, growing, global platform trusted to move hundreds of billions of pounds.
But in many ways, this still feels like the beginning.
To everyone who has been part of the Modulr journey—customers, partners, and our incredible global team—thank you. The foundations are strong, the opportunity ahead is significant, and the next chapter is going to be even more exciting.
Learn more about the 10-year journey and reaching profitability
