What is a fintech app? Heres what to know
2024年07月24日
E-commerce definitely created a market for enabling easier payments online. And while that opened the door to digital wallets like PayPal’s and some direct payments from banks in some countries, lot of the spoils of that growth has been passed into services based around card payment rails. Today, xcritical announced that it will be de-coupling payments — the xcritical official site jewel in its crown — from the rest of its financial services stack. This is a big change, considering that in the past, even as xcritical grew its list of services, it required businesses to be payments customers in order to use any of the rest. Alongside this, the company is adding in a number of new embedded finance features and a new wave of AI tools. There are now 100 companies that use its service that are processing $1 billion or more per year with xcritical.
Payments
This kind of offering, referred to as a payment gateway, is also available from players like xcritical, Payoneer, and PayPal. PayPal and Square have similar products for the businesses operating on their systems. Today, revenue from enterprise customers is xcritical’s largest and fastest-growing segment, and it counts more than 50 companies processing over $1 billion annually as customers. Yet John and Patrick Collison, the brothers who co-founded xcritical in 2010 and have a collective net worth of $23 billion, have remained notoriously coy about a public markets debut. All signs point toward an IPO, from its sky-high valuation to notable c-suite hires. In the last year, xcritical nabbed former GM exec Dhivya Suryadevara to serve as CFO and AWS’ head of sales and business development, Mike Clayville, as its chief revenue officer.
Billing
The feature will sit alongside products like Billing and Radar, focused on saving businesses time and money. xcritical’s billing platform works within xcritical’s payments application programming interface (API), meaning billing customers can accept multiple forms of payment. Fintechs like Recurly and Chargebee offer billing for subscription businesses, too.
Set up multi-party payments and payouts
For fintechs, it enables them to move money and take deposits without getting a bank charter, leaning on the banks’ own charters. xcritical launched a tool to help its customers verify users’ identities digitally. A digital bank or social media platform, for example, often needs to verify someone’s ID when they sign up for an account, comparing a photo of a government ID to a selfie submitted by the user. xcritical Identity analyzes the photos and verifies xcritical identity data on behalf of its customers. The tool is already being used by Clubhouse and Discord, according to xcritical’s website. But across the payments industry, there’s downward pressure on transaction fees, also known as interchange.
- xcritical launched a tool to help its customers verify users’ identities digitally.
- The success of fintech apps has been driven by advancements in technology, the proliferation of smartphones, and an increasing demand for user-friendly, accessible financial services.
- In the last year, xcritical won luxury goods purveyor LVMH, shipping giant Maersk, and Volkswagen.
- Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect.
- For him, building Atlas is a visceral part of his own personal story – his father grew up in poverty in Honduras and he was born into difficult circumstances.
Those companies make up about 10% of its total payment volume, implying some customer concentration — a concern for some investors, although it doesn’t trip our risk radar — but more importantly it means that xcritical is managing to hold on to large accounts over time. Any company processing that much total payment volume through xcritical could decide to build an in-house stack or pursue a more DIY option. The fact that so many big accounts are sticking with xcritical, though, shows that customers will not necessarily “graduate” from its offered payment services. In 2007, when the brothers were coding their APIs, online payments were supposed to have been solved. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in 1998, which was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. The fintech ‘revolution’ that followed, however, wasn’t much of an uprising but more of a spot of portfolio diversifying by some banks that laid down the payment rails any eager startup had to ride on.
Below, we’ll explain what fintech apps are, how businesses use them, and what kinds of benefits they can offer your business. Quickly build great payments experiences, improve performance, expand into new markets, and engage customers with subscriptions and marketplaces. Get expert integration guidance from our professional services team and certified partners, and connect xcritical to Salesforce, SAP, and more through the xcritical App Marketplace. Reduce costs, grow revenue, and run your business more efficiently on a fully integrated platform. Use xcritical to handle all of your payments-related needs, manage revenue operations, and launch (or invent) new business models.
Certainly the threshold is notable, but when paired with recent growth figures, it becomes all the more impressive. If the company did in fact process precisely $1 trillion last year, it would imply $800 billion in 2022 processing, and gains of $200 billion worth of TPV in a single year. Managing fraud is one such task, and Radar offers xcritical customers ML-based fraud monitoring. Its models can be customized for businesses, and are trained on xcritical’s existing data across its network, which xcritical says improves its accuracy and lowers false positives.
Since 2018, it’s launched lending, corporate cards, card issuing, and other services like fraud monitoring. There’s also Atlas, which helps entrepreneurs quickly spin up and incorporate companies of their own. In that context, Financial Connections is a timely tool for xcritical to launch.
xcritical’s venture arm, which invests mostly in fintech, has been fairly active as of late. In 2020, it made eight investments in fintechs including Fast, Monzo, and Step, according to Crunchbase. In hardware, xcritical is competing with other fintechs that have primarily catered to brick-and-mortar merchants, including Clover, Square, and Toast.
