Brite Raises $60 Million to Expand Instant Payments

Swedish FinTech Brite Payments has raised $60 million to expand its instant payment offering.

The funding round, announced Wednesday (Oct. 4), was led by Dawn Capital along with a number of Sweden’s other FinTech players.

“Brite will use the fresh funding to accelerate its geographic expansion, strengthen its presence in existing markets, and invest further in product development,” the company said in a news release. “Notably, the capital will drive further development of the Brite Instant Payments Network (Brite IPN); a proprietary network that is the backbone of the company’s offering.”

According to the release, the funding follows a year in which Brite more than doubled its transaction volume and revenue, and achieved profitability.

“We see account-to-account payments gaining momentum across Europe, but merchants are still struggling to realize the full potential for their businesses,” said Lena Hackelöer, the company’s founder and CEO. “That’s why we’ve built a complete instant A2A payments and payouts offering that can be plugged into any checkout, while eliminating operational hassles such as settlement accounts, reconciliation or FX.”

PYMNTS spoke with Hackelöer last year about — among other things — the importance of her company’s collaborations with banks to improve customer relationships.

Brite had just teamed with SOFORT, an online bank transfer hub in Europe, allowing merchants on that platform to use Brite’s payment solution without additional technical effort. Hackelöer told PYMNTS leaning on this sort of partnership opportunity was crucial to business growth and success.

“[It] helps us to become relevant to the consumer population and together then deliver a better product than what we could have offered individually,” she said the the time.

More recently, PYMNTS interviewed Link Money CEO Eric Shoykhet about what Europe can teach the U.S. about open banking.

As that report noted, pay-by-bank is gaining a wider embrace in the U.S., with merchants backing it because they have a strong incentive: It can reduce their payment processing costs by as much as 70% or 80%, said Shoykhet.

On the consumer side of commerce, there are still macro factors that will underscore the benefits of open banking, he said.

“High interest rates, specifically on credit cards, are pushing consumers to shift to debit transactions and opt for the seamless pay-by-bank checkout offerings that (with the help of providers including Link Money) are linked to mobile apps and biometrics,” the report said.

As Shoykhet noted – pointing to Europe’s and Latin America’s experience as a harbinger — “payments tend to move from expensive methods to lower-cost methods over time.”