Payments firm Modulr expands to Edinburgh after raising £10.5m
BUSINESS payments firm Modulr has opened an office in Edinburgh following its latest funding round.
The London-based company, which offers payment technology to a range of start-ups and alternative lenders, recently completed an investment led by digital venture builder Blenheim Chalcot, bringing its total funding to £10.5m.
It now plans to take advantage of Edinburgh’s burgeoning fintech scene by opening a new office in the city and growing its software engineering, customer support, risk and compliance, and finance teams.
Modulr expects to double its headcount during the last six months of the year to over 100 employees across both its Edinburgh and London offices.
Read more: Payments platform Modulr joins Innovate Finance
The Edinburgh team will extend Modulr’s current payments offering to existing and new customers in alternative lending, payments fintech, payroll services, finance software providers and marketplaces, as well as into new markets.
The firm’s digital payments account, which automates and manages payments in real time, will also be enhanced with new features that open-up additional ways for customers to get paid, reconcile and make payments instantly.
Modulr said it chose Edinburgh for its excellent talent pool, support from industry and government bodies such as FinTech Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, and for being the UK’s second largest financial services centre.
Scotland has seen the number of people employed in the financial and related professional services industry grow by 6.6 per cent from 151,000 to 161,000 in the last year.
Read more: Lenders flock to Scotland as P2P sector takes off
Myles Stephenson, chief executive of Modulr, said building high quality and scalable software engineering, risk and compliance, customer support and finance teams is critical to the firm’s current and future growth.
“Following our strong initial success, we identified the need to scale and we set about looking for a location with a strong talent pool and pipeline,” he added.
Stephen Ingledew, chief executive of FinTech Scotland, stated: “Edinburgh is a burgeoning hub for talented software developers. Combine this with the city’s unmatched financial services heritage, and we have a recipe for success for ambitious fintech leaders like Modulr.”
Since launching in January 2016, Modulr has processed £4.2bn in business payments, while transaction volumes have been growing by an average of 11 per cent month-on-month.
Read more: Payments are pivotal
