Thursday 1 June 2023: Building on Europe’s world-leading payments regulation framework, Modulr today announces the next stage in its European growth with deeper presence and product functionality specifically for the French and Spanish markets. Regulatory and branch registration approvals with central banks the Banque de France and Banco de España allows the embedded payments leader to add a layer of specific localisation in these markets, increasing the competitiveness of regional firms both in-country and across the UK and EEA.
Modulr enables any software-based business to embed payment and account functionality directly into their own tech stack and move money securely and compliantly across the UK and EEA with a single set of flexible and scalable APIs.
Modulr allows business payments to operate 24/7, under full software control, and in real-time – an alternative to traditional corporate bank payments which fail to offer these features which customers increasingly expect. Building on Modulr’s highly flexible account creation APIs, businesses can automatically reconcile high volume income payments without the usual manual and lengthy processes, and make payments in real time rather than waiting for batch processes to complete. Businesses across financial services, travel, accounting, payroll, property, marketplaces already use Modulr today, using its accounts, payments and open banking APIs, webhooks for alerting, and physical and virtual card programmes.
Modulr was founded to solve one of the biggest pain points for many businesses; the manual nature, time and cost involved in sending and receiving payments. The solution has been serving UK clients since 2016 and European clients since 2020, delivering 168% growth in customers and a transaction volume increase of almost 580% in 2022 As an authorised and regulated Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licenced in the EU by the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, Modulr can operate compliantly and at scale across Europe, issuing accounts and enabling account-to-account and card payments across a variety of schemes.
Myles Stephenson, Modulr’s CEO and Founder, says, “Our ambition is to bring the benefit of Embedded Payments to all businesses and solve the current problem of broken business payments. Our customers benefit from creating new revenue opportunities, substantially improving process cost and efficiency, and transformed end-customer experiences. Ultimately, this creates huge opportunities for economic growth across the continent and enables businesses to provide enhanced customer experiences, all thanks to the progressive regulatory environment fostered by the European Union and the UK.”
Modulr is a regulated Electronic Money Institution (EMI) by the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK and is a SEPA participant via their integration with the Bank of Lithuania’s CENTROlink system. Launching a selection of European IBANs (French and Spanish IBANs, in addition to our existing Irish and Dutch IBANs) gives Modulr even greater scale to operate locally and on a Pan-European basis as well as supporting expansion ambitions of our UK and European clients by issuing accounts with sort codes and Euro IBANs to businesses across the region.
Modulr has grown to become the leading provider of embedded payments to organisations across the UK and Europe. Embedded payments is a new category that permits payments to become part of organisations’ technology stack, upgrading them to become payments companies themselves. Modulr enables hundreds of enterprise customers and thousands of SME customers to embed account creation, payment out, reconciliation of payment in, card issuing and many open banking and similar features into their own business process flows via API calls and webhooks into Modulr’s cloud platform. Core to Modulr’s success has been the platform itself, Modulr’s regulatory status as an EMI in the UK and Europe, its connections to payments and other financial service schemes, its ability to operate at scale, and its compliance rigour. Today Modulr handles over £100bn of annualised payment volume and its platform handles on average 30 API calls per second.