Notable investors back API banking startup Griffin

London based startup Griffin has secured a £3m seed round to build a fully regulated banking platform for fintech startups.

The cash comes from leading VCs Seedcamp and Tribe Capital and notable investors such as Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, the founders of Indeed.com.

Griffin hopes to simplify the process of building and launching financial products for any business, by using its API banking platform.

The startup is building a platform enabling firms to ringfence funds for customers with built-in compliance features and a ledger, helping companies to get their financial products to market efficiently.

In theory, businesses should be able to get set up in days to start building new financial products, rather than the current industry average of six months just to get set up with traditional banks.

Seedcamp partner Tom Wilson, whose firm also led Griffin’s 2018 pre-seed round, said, “We’ve seen first-hand how punishing the current onboarding processes can be for fintech startups.

“It’s affected a lot of the firms in our portfolio, and we’re excited to be backing a company that has a serious plan to solve that problem.”

David Jarvis, co-founder and CEO of Griffin, says the startup is hoping to let businesses offer dedicated bank accounts to their customers. 

“That means no more having to refund transactions from your pooled account because you can’t figure out which customer account it was supposed to go to,” he added.

Jarvis told AltFi that he and his co-founder Rohner, “have the advantage of naivety as we’re techies so can look at banking from a different angle and take a blank slate approach to find the cleanest solution.”

Other investors in the round include Paul Townsend and Phil McGriskin, founders of Vitesse PSP, and Charlie Delingpole, founder of MarketFinance and ComplyAdvantage - who’ll be speaking at AltFi’s London Summit 2020 on 18 May.

The newly raised capital will support Griffin to build its core banking system as well as moving towards gaining a bank license with UK regulators.

Griffin was set up in 2017 by Jarvis and Allen Rohner and has since been joined by experienced bank executives including John Weguelin, former CEO of Zenith Bank and the European Islamic Investment Bank, who joined as Chairman.