B2B open banking payments startup Crezco closes £3m seed

Crezco has struck partnerships with Xero, QuickBooks and other B2B platforms since launching in 2020.

Crezco, a new fintech startup aiming to provide free open banking B2B payments, has closed a £3m seed round. 

A number of high profile fintech angels took part in the round, including Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO of Comply Advantage and Chris Adelsbach, a fintech investor and managing partner at Outrun Ventures. 

London-based  Crezco was founded in 2020 by CEO Ralph Rogge and CTO Igor Pikovsky. 

It provides a free payment API using open banking rails across UK and international markets for B2B payments such as invoice payments “as convenient as B2C card payments, without the costs collected by companies like Visa and MasterCard”. 

In this market, the firm is taking on the likes GoCardless and Stripe but with free entry-level service.

The company has partnerships with Xero, QuickBooks and other B2B platforms for invoice payments.

Speaking to AltFi Rogge, formerly COO of Youlend, said monetisation will come from offering new services on top of free payments and may consider becoming a bank at a later stage.

“We were talking to investors and they said payments were getting cheaper and cheaper, why not just take it to zero and start there. Build a better proposition, which sounds crazy to a lot of people but it is how things like Dropbox, Slack or Hubspot work.”

“It has zero marginal cost to us, once you’re connected to the bank through an API. We want to create more value add through new features.”

In the fintech space, Rogge adds, there has been a lot of unbundling over the years with companies like Transferwise.

“There does seem to be a bit more re-bundling going on, with these products now being brought back together under one roof.”

Rogge goes on to say that fintech has been disappointing in the UK, despite incredible valuations for some firms, in comparison to west coast US SaaS companies.

“A real problem is that they haven't been able to scale internationally,” he said.

Open banking, however, he adds, will allow innovation to “sit on top” of banks and plug in new infrastructure providers. 

“We’re starting with payments, then FX, lending and deposits last,” he said.