UK-based Open Banking payments start up raises $6.5m
IN BRIEF:
- The platform offers merchants an alternative to debit card payments
- The seed funding round is led by the Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures
- Atoa claims that the Mastercard and Visa payment rails have an effective duopoly in the market, whilst its system slashes the cost of accepting payments by up to 70%
What does this mean?
Cian O’Dowd, COO, Atoa, tells The Irish Times: "Most fintechs these days are not fundamentally disrupting the market but are instead merely slotting themselves into the existing rails of Visa and Mastercard. They give us nice user interfaces and fancy metal debit cards but the high merchant fees, excessive bureaucracy and outdated infrastructure remains. Open banking payments, such as Atoa, represent a major shift in the global payments sector.”
