The Currency Cloud gets $10M to shuttle your payments across international borders

Many companies have been working on making domestic electronic payment processing better, and a few have focused on improving cross-border payments.

The elegantly-named company The Currency Cloud, which does precisely that, has just announced a new funding round to the tune of $10 million (£6 million) from Atlas Venture, Anthemis Group, Notion Capital, XAnge Private Equity, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The name of The Currency Cloud’s game is international payments. It has built a payments engine, and the company claims to provide payments services for its customers in a more transparent, streamlined, and affordable way than the available alternatives. It does so through its RESTful APIs, which are developer-friendly and easy to customize and integrate into one’s product.

“While 85 percent of international payments go through banks, more and more businesses are now turning to us to provide their international payments capabilities,” said chief executive Mike Laven in an official statement.

“Unlike other payments providers, we make cross-border payments transparent and frictionless.”

Interestingly, unlike most other companies also offering payments-as-a-service (Stripe, Braintree, and so on), The Currency Cloud only charges a monthly fee instead of transaction-based fees.

Among its clients, the company already counts banks such as Fidor Bank and MedBank; ecommerce payments firms such Sofort and Zippcard; and payments firms including Payoneer, Kantox, Azimo, and Transferwise.

The Currency Cloud seem to lend itself especially well to Transferwise, which is a peer-to-peer currency exchange market aiming to make currency exchange more affordable by cutting out the fee banks add on top of the exchange. The Currency Cloud’s cross-border is an obvious service to power this marketplace.

Year on year, the total number of transactions passing through it has increased twelvefold, and the company is now moving billions of dollars around the world every year, according to an official statement.

The Currency Cloud was founded in early 2012 and is based in London, U.K. This latest round brings its funding to a total of $17 million.