Buckzy Raises $14M to Expand X-Border Payment Offerings

Buckzy Payments has raised $14.5 million to expand its cross-border payment offerings.

The Toronto-based company said the Series A funding — in the form of all-equity financing — will help it improve on its product and expand into new regions, according to a Thursday (Dec. 1) news release.

“This round of financing is a validation of Buckzy’s vision to create an intelligent and automated international payment system,” said Abdul Naushad, the company’s founder and CEO, in the release. “We’re on a mission to build the plumbing for real-time money movement globally, the same way high-speed internet fundamentally shifted the communications industry.”

Founded in 2018, Buckzy’s embedded finance platform offers real-time, cross-border payments and Banking-as-a-Service capabilities for banks, neobanks and FinTechs, disbursing funds to more than 80 countries. Its features include multicurrency bank accounts, local settlement accounts, and real-time, cross-border quoting and booking.

The news comes just days after global financial messaging system Swift announced that sign-ups for its cross-border payments service had tripled since launching last year.

Swift Go, “which brings speed, transparency, and certainty” to payments of less than $10,000, is now used by more than 500 banks in more than 120 countries.

The service was designed to help small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and peer-to-peer senders move funds across borders, as these are more likely to be surprised by unexpected fees and don’t have the power of larger companies to negotiate a discount on cross-border payment fees.

Research by PYMNTS has found that there’s a wealth of opportunities for financial institutions (FIs) to provide better cross-border payment solutions to their clients.

As reported in our “B2B Cross-Border Payments” collaboration with American Express, almost two-thirds of FI executives have said that their cross-border payment solutions are effective in addressing the cross-border pain points faced by their SMB clients, which leaves 37% stating that those solutions are less than effective.