New York-based fintech startup, Extend, announces its $40 million Series B fundraising round led by March Capital and backed by B Capital, Point72 Ventures, Fintech Collective, Reciprocal Ventures, Wells Fargo, and Pacific Western Bank. This support garnered by such reputable fintech investors demonstrates the potential behind Extend’s unique vision for the future of payments.
“The market is inundated with neobanks offering new banking solutions but there’s little payment innovation coming out of established institutions. Extend is laying the foundation for the next generation of growth for major banks.”
Founded on the realization that complex payment infrastructure is impeding main street banks from innovating at pace, coupled with evolving customer expectations in a rapidly growing competitive market, Extend’s mission is to modernize the payments industry from the inside out. To date, Extend has integrated directly with major networks and processors—including Global Payments/TSYS, Mastercard, and Visa—to build a platform that supports innovative product development on top of the infrastructure banks are built upon; meaning card issuers can enable Extend’s solutions with their current product offerings, no technical implementation required. Most recently, American Express announced they are now offering Extend’s virtual card platform to their millions of Business Card Members, at no additional cost and with the freedom to self-onboard in minutes with the card in their pocket.
“We were excited by the approach Extend has taken to building this digital infrastructure that enables modernization for banks across the industry,” shared Sumant Mandal of March Capital. “The market is inundated with neobanks offering new banking solutions but there’s little payment innovation coming out of established institutions. Extend is laying the foundation for the next generation of growth for major banks.”
Extend’s virtual card platform comprises a number of offerings including the first virtual card platform-as-service—a direct answer to the competition issuers are seeing from alternative corporate card solutions. Complete with a ready-to-use, front-end experience, not only can issuers offer their customers a suite of new features today, but businesses can onboard with their existing credit cards. This is a monumental paradigm shift in the market. While competitors require a customer to switch bank partners and open a new account, and existing virtual card offerings have only been accessible at an enterprise level, Extend is the first to deliver an issuer-agnostic solution for SMBs, at scale.
Additionally, Extend offers a number of API solutions for banks and 3rd-party service providers. Banks can leverage these solutions to drive new product development with customers—one example being a BNPL solution on credit rails that Extend facilitated between a bank partner and an established lending company. Banks can also lean on Extend and its API connectivity to embed payments directly into 3rd-party platforms, such as AP software or in the case of one Extend client, a travel booking software. These API offerings enable issuers to effortlessly standup new products, accelerate partner integrations, and expand the number of services available to their customers.
“At Pacific Western Bank, we are always looking to better serve our customers and strive to keep up with the latest in payment innovation. When we heard what Extend could do for us, we were instantly excited by the opportunity to implement such valuable services—the cost and time it would have taken us to build something like this ourselves made it completely unfeasible,” comments Mark Yung, EVP and Chief Operating Officer at Pacific Western Bank. “We were even more impressed with the sheer level of support Extend provided through the entire onboarding process and how quickly they were able to white label the solution so we could give our customers a seamless, branded experience.”
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Pacific Western Bank is not the only bank thrilled about the potential for growth with Extend. Already, Extend has seen momentous gains across their platform with just a handful of participating issuers. With close to 2,000 business customers currently using the platform, Extend is growing 30% month-over-month with an impressive run rate north of a billion dollars. But the value goes beyond numbers. It’s no secret that demand for digital solutions has skyrocketed over the last year, and businesses are looking to their banks for solutions to the challenges that have arisen in the current climate—Extend is perfectly poised to help issuers answer this call.
“As industry veterans, we saw first-hand how issuers were struggling to overcome the complexity of banking infrastructure,” Andrew Jamison, CEO & Co-founder of Extend. “With competition proving concepts for payment innovation and showing us the path forward, it was clear that banks standing on legacy systems would be left behind if unable to meet new customer expectations. The upside is that customers don’t want to leave their banks and that’s where we come in. By streamlining access to key components of the payment stack, we’ve been able to deliver solutions that are universally accessible. But what excites me most, is the creativity that such accessibility breeds—not only are we helping banks reach the new status quo, we are seeing innovators develop their own solutions with the flexibility of our platform.”
With the latest round of funding secured, Extend has big plans to further develop their platform and expand their service offerings, including bringing the same ubiquitous card solutions to the consumer market.
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