Weavr acquires Comma to bring open banking to embedded finance

A year after raising $40m from Tiger Global, Weavr is combining open banking and BaaS.

Weavr has acquired B2B open banking platform Comma Payments to bring open banking to the embedded finance space.

In a “largely equity-based” acquisition, Weavr will take on most of Comma’s current workforce, including founder and CEO Tom Beckenham and chief technical officer Gianluca Pengo.

According to ‘plug-and-play’ financial infrastructure provider Weavr, bringing Comma on board will make it the first embedded finance provider to combine Banking as a Service (Baas) and open banking with an optimised B2B embeddable payment solution.

“Clearly, open banking and BaaS represent the two most innovative trends in finance right now, and it’s exciting to finally bring them together into one powerful solution,” Weavr co-founder and CEO Alex Mifsud said.

“As a company committed to breaking new ground in this field, we’re delighted to be the first to offer a solution of this kind and feel confident that our customers will immediately benefit from greater functionality and a more seamless onboarding process.”

Mifsud described Comma’s B2B open banking payment solution as “the best we’ve ever seen”, and said the acquisition is perhaps the most existing step in Weavr’s growth journey.

The acquisition comes off the back of a big year for Weavr, which has more than tripled its user base since its $40m Series A funding round just over a year ago, and has seen transactions grow by over 340 per cent in 12 months.

“We’ve watched Weavr’s growth closely and saw synergies with their plug-and-play model that could have greatly benefited our customers,” Beckenham said.

“With Comma teaming up with Weavr, the combined company can begin to offer a first-of-its-kind service that will greatly benefit customers across multiple sectors,” he added.