Extend raises $40m for its virtual card offering to help banks better compete with fintechs
Congrats to Andrew, Guillaume, Daniel, and the Extend team on raising their $40m Series B to accelerate their mission to modernize the virtual payments stack for banks. We welcome in new investors March Capital and B Capital and double down with Point72 Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Wells Fargo, and Pacific Western Bank.
This round comes on the back of Extend’s partnerships with American Express, Global Payments/TSYS, Mastercard, and Visa to offer virtual card issuing capabilities to their business customers.
FTC Summary
Extend’s mission is to modernize the payments industry from the inside out. To date, Extend has integrated directly with major networks and processors—including Global Payments/TSYS, Mastercard, and Visa—to build a platform that supports innovative product development on top of the infrastructure banks are built upon; meaning card issuers can enable Extend’s solutions with their current product offerings, no technical implementation required. Most recently, American Express announced they are now offering Extend’s virtual card platform to their millions of Business Card Members, at no additional cost and with the freedom to self-onboard in minutes with the card in their pocket.
Extend’s virtual card platform comprises a number of offerings including the first virtual card platform-as-service—a direct answer to the competition issuers are seeing from alternative corporate card solutions - at an enterprise level, Extend is the first to deliver an issuer-agnostic solution for SMBs, at scale.
Additionally, Extend offers a number of API solutions for banks and 3rd-party service providers — one example being a BNPL solution on credit rails that Extend facilitated between a bank partner and an established lending company. Banks can also lean on Extend and its API connectivity to embed payments directly into 3rd-party platforms, such as AP software or in the case of one Extend client, a travel booking software. These API offerings enable issuers to effortlessly stand up new products, accelerate partner integrations, and expand the number of services available to their customers.
As industry veterans, we saw first-hand how issuers were struggling to overcome the complexity of banking infrastructure. With competition proving concepts for payment innovation and showing us the path forward, it was clear that banks standing on legacy systems would be left behind if unable to meet new customer expectations.
Andrew Jamison, CEO & Co-founder of Extend