Chris Newkirk

Railsbank Becomes Visa BIN Sponsor as its Clients Rejoice

Railsbank, banking as a service provider based out of London, has announced that it has become a Visa Ready Banking Identification Number (BIN) sponsor. This partnership enables the clients of Railsbank to get the same payment technology, expertise, and reliability that they would have got if they had partnered directly with Visa for its card issuer program.

This is expected to make it much easier for startups to immediately scale and get approval to issue cards and Railsbank would also provide the technological help for the fintech to onboard them and make full use of the card issuer program without having to go to Visa for their approval.

Nigel Verdon, CEO, and Co-founder, Railsbank, said: “Our partnership with Visa gives us the opportunity to provide companies with a broad range of Visa payment solutions, such as Cards-as-a-Service, that meet the identified needs of their users. Railsbank simplifies the process of embedding financial services into a customer journey and can therefore help any company – no matter what industry or sector they’re in – to become a fintech by adapting to the needs of their market and customers quickly and easily.”

Visa has been partnering with many such companies as it begins to throw open its network to such partners which it believes would be a way for it to make full use of its network and also be able to onboard newer clients including institutions. With credit card adoption has hit a wall and with digital payments and cardless payments beginning to grow, it makes good business sense for Visa to go with the flow and make use of its network to facilitate such transactions and grow its business.

Railsbank provides APIs for banking, payment products, and credit cards and the company had raised $70 million about a week back which brought its valuation close to a billion dollars. The company would be looking to expand on its products and its approval as a BIN sponsor from Visa should be a boost for its plans to take this service across various regions.

The banking as a service industry has been growing very strongly in recent times with several companies getting multi-million dollar valuations and investors also queuing up to fund them. The need for bringing banks and financial services under a single umbrella is what is driving such valuations as the race to do the same is well and truly on.