Fabrick Beefs Up Embedded Finance Strength With Judopay Purchase

Open finance company Fabrick says it has acquired British mobile payments firm Judopay.

The deal, announced Wednesday (May 17), marries Fabrick’s Payment Orchestra — its payments orchestration product — with Judopay’s digital commerce expertise.

“The acquisition of Judopay will expand Fabrick’s proprietary technology enabling the company to offer a better service to merchants who will be able to manage more efficiently all the financial and data flows involved in the payments process from a single point, even when taking payments from multiple gateways,” the company said in a news release.

Payment Orchestra, per the Fabrick website, is a “global payment gateway aggregator” that lets clients “orchestrate international online payments on a single platform quickly and securely.”

Payments orchestration can be a key resource to meet the demands that come with adopting new payment methods, Spreedly CEO Justin Benson argued earlier this year in the PYMNTS eBook, “2023 Payments New Year’s Resolutions.”

“Payment service providers (PSPs) are now starting to understand and accept the need for orchestration,” Benson wrote. “In the past, the belief was that they offered a comprehensive solution and it would meet the needs of any merchant, aggregator or platform.”

That strategy has begun to shift, he said. While it’s understandable to be reluctant to support a transaction flow through someone else, PSPs are rethinking their positions as demands from merchant customers grow.

“Many of the larger PSPs in the industry are doing exploratory work to see how they can augment their offerings and retain merchants,” Benson wrote. “For the right customer, it is worth a partnership approach to meet all needs.”

In addition to Judopay’s digital commerce capabilities, Fabric adds that the purchase marks a key step in its expansion into the U.K., Europe’s largest digital payments market “and one of the most cashless societies in the world.”

“This makes the UK the ideal country to develop new models and standards of embedded finance based on the most advanced and complete payment solutions to support corporations in taking advantage of the current revolution in addition to representing a large addressable market,” the release said.

Part of that revolution is happening on the real-time payments front, PYMNTS wrote last week, with U.K. retailers leading their American counterparts in efforts to further support the technology, per “Retail Payments Innovation Year in Review: How Real-Time Payments Drive the in-Store Customer Journey,” a collaboration with ACI Worldwide.

While just 2.6% of U.S. retailers said they wanted to improve support for real-time payments in the next three years, 6% of British merchants said the same.

At the same time, a respective 33% and 43% of U.S. and U.K. merchants said they wanted to add support for instant payments.