B2B Pay Pursues Status As Regulated Bank

B2B payments and international money transfer company B2B Pay has announced plans to become a regulated financial institution, and is looking to investors to fuel its growth.

In an announcement sent to PYMNTS, B2BPay Founder and CEO Neil Ambikar said the company will pursue becoming a regulated financial institution to accelerate growth and introduce new services in addition to its offerings. B2B Pay plans to roll out API-enabled banking services, the ability to create an unlimited number of International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), credit card processing and solutions related to cryptocurrency.

In its efforts to expand, B2B Pay plans to raise about $411,000, which would go toward implementation of its core banking system and finance its pursuit of licenses. Existing backers have already committed about $164,000 of this funding round, Ambikar said.

In 2016 U.K. bank Barclays announced support for B2B Pay as part of its Tel Aviv Barclays Accelerator program. At the time, the Accelerator pointed to B2BPay’s ability to create IBANs to enable faster, more affordable cross-border B2B transactions. Ambikar launched the company after witnessing the challenges that companies in India’s pharmaceutical industry faced to export across borders without losing money to foreign exchange rates and other cross-border transaction fees.

The company was among 40 FinTechs accepted into the Accelerator. At the time, B2BPay supported payments to and from 34 nations.

Its focus on API banking is aligned with the broader cross-border B2B payment industry trend in support of API integrations and open banking business models.

Visa recently announced a partnership with Chain, Inc. to develop a solution for financial institutions to facilitate secure B2B payments for large-value, cross-border transactions. That partnership aims to develop a platform that uses APIs to connect businesses to each other to make payments.

Mastercard also similarly added blockchain APIs to its developer site after announcing its B2B pilot.