Extend was founded three years ago with one mission: to democratize access to modern payment experiences. Since inception, major investors including Point72 Ventures, FinTech Collective, Reciprocal Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada and more joined to bring this vision to life. Today, the fintech is leading payment innovation in close collaboration with the three major card networks including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to extend digital card issuing capabilities for banks such as American Express, Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley Bank, City National Bank and several others to be announced early next year.
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Amidst an unprecedented year, Extend has seen the demand for digital payments skyrocket—an already growing trend that was undoubtedly accelerated by the pandemic. In 2020, Extend doubled its number of bank partnerships and has joined the Wells Fargo Accelerator program, onboarded ten times the number of business customers, and saw spend volume across its platform increase 150x.
While the uptick in spend volume was an exciting metric to see, Extend’s significant progress with strategic partners has been a game changer for issuing banks. Mastercard onboarded Extend as a vendor, enabling issuers to contract directly with Mastercard for Extend’s services. Banks can now bypass the challenges of vendor onboarding, saving as much as two years to bring a comparable solution to market.
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Continuing the growth in strategic partnerships, Extend and TSYS made headlines with the announcement of their new tokenization capabilities. Extend is the first card payment platform with the ability to push true virtual cards to mobile wallets. By bringing virtual cards to point-of-sale in this way, Extend has paved the way for deeper market penetration, exposing endless potential for virtual cards in all corners of the payment space. This new tokenization service also gives app developers the ability to provision any card—virtual, physical, credit, or debit— to a mobile wallet with the push of a button.
By signing key partnerships across the industry and integrating core issuing capabilities into its wheelhouse, Extend is set up to be an innovative player with payment services that support new categories of growth. To compliment their seamless tech integrations, an entire redesign of the front-end experience was rolled out this year, providing issuing banks with a digital corporate card app that rivals many up and coming neobanks.
Extend’s new user experience also debuted a number of features—including the ability to give others budgets and send Guest Access cards to non-Extend users and integrations with expense platforms and innovators like Plaid, which have enabled seamless use of Extend within clients’ existing payment processes.
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