Online merchants usually pay up to 8% of every sale to companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Stripe, and pass those costs on to consumers. So-called “account-to-account” or “A2A” payments can cut transaction fees to below 1%, saving merchants and consumers quite a bit of cash. The difficulty has been in making it seamless for both merchants and customers.
Italian-origin startup Volume thinks it has come up with the answer: a one-click checkout solution via an embeddable widget that is as easy to integrate as PayPal.
“Imagine a traditional payment company like Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, or Checkout.com. They charge between 2% and 8% on everything that we buy online. We want to change that. There are no more intermediaries… there is the simple movement of money from your bank account to the account of the merchant,” Simone Martinelli, founder and CEO of Volume (pictured above, third from right), told TechCrunch.
So how is it that Volume has managed to break the mold on this issue?
“The missing bit is the user experience,” said Martinelli. “You need to prompt the user for their account number and sort code. But we compressed it all into one click. So we’ve managed to solve the user interface. Nobody else is really looking at the user experience. We think we’ve built the ’Apple Pay’ of the account-to-account space,” he claimed.
Volume has a flat-rate pricing model and transactions are completed by its infrastructure partner, Yapily, while authentication is done via the user’s banking app.
The company has now raised $6 million in a seed round led by United Ventures. It had previously raised a pre-seed round of $2.4 million in 2022. The company now plans to obtain FCA approval in the U.K. and expand internationally.
The startup might just be onto a good run. A2A startup Fast collapsed after raising $150 million from Stripe and other investors. Meanwhile Kevin raised $65 million from top global investors, but ended up being declared insolvent this year.
In a statement, Paolo Gesess, founder and managing partner at United Ventures, said: “Volume’s ability to grow GMV by 163x over the past year validates the enormous opportunity ahead.”
Volume has also recently boosted its team, hiring Justin Sebok, formerly head of product at the fintech Curve; Richard Frenken, formerly of iZettle; and Shannon Krishna, who worked at WorldRemit and Luno.
Fabrick, the open finance platform that’s part of the Sella Group, and existing investors Firstminute Capital, SeedX, and Haatch also participated in the seed round.
