Germany’s Ivy raises €7 million to ‘build a better payments world’ with its global API for instant bank payments

German fintech start-up Ivy says it is building a ‘better payments world’ with it global API for instant bank payments. It’s (metaphorically) taking the scissors to cards as its payments solution lets merchants accept instant bank payments at the checkout – cutting out card transaction costs and speeding up the process.

Its solution ‘smartly routes between different instant bank schemes and bank infrastructure providers, always selecting the connection with the highest probability of success. This orchestration technology ensures superior connectivity and conversion via a single gateway’.

“In ten years, trillions of dollars’ worth of payments will be paid by bank, not by card – a major shift Ivy will drive. Over 60 geographies worldwide are rolling out Instant bank payment infrastructure right now. Ivy brings these regional and disparate structures to a harmonised interface for real-time payments,” says Ferdinand Dabitz, co-founder Ivy. 

Its Pay by Bank option adds easily to any checkout via its API or as a plugin for all major shop systems like Shopify, Shopware, Magento or WooCommerce.

Ivy has raised a €7 million Seed round led by Creandum and including 10xFounders, Jens Lapinski from Angel Invest and several angel investors including Jeppe Rindom, Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein, Oliver Merkel, Christian Grobe, Matthias Knecht, Martin Blessing and F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg.

“Account-to-account payments are just getting started. What began with Open Banking in Europe has now become a global movement, with rails around the world becoming increasingly mature. Having looked at several legacy players as well as start-ups in this space, Ivy’s product was outperforming its peers significantly across all relevant metrics – conversion, adoption, success rates. We feel the team has found a winning proposition,” says Simon Schmincke, General Partner at Creandum.

Ivy has also built instant payouts, refunds, pay by link, affordability checks and enhanced KYC products, alongside detailed transaction monitoring and a highly customisable risk suite.

“We are hyper-focused on user flows and a seamless experience. Essentially, our goal is to turn every bank account into an instant payment wallet,” adds Dabitz.

Ivy’s global API is currently available in Europe, the U.S., MENA and SEA regions – connecting with over 500 million bank accounts in over 50 geographies. It has also set up a partnership with Ecosia, a non-profit with more than 20 million monthly active users, to enable merchants to use part of their savings to contribute to support reforestation for their users at no extra cost.

Main image: Ivy founders Peter Mosebjane Lieck, Simon Wimmer, Ferdinand Dabitz, and Joshua Becker