High-growth UK payments FinTech start-up Modulr has opened a new office in Edinburgh to take advantage of the city’s burgeoning FinTech scene.
The move will allow the young company to grow its software engineering, customer support, risk and compliance and finance teams.
Modulr recently completed its latest funding round, led by the UK’s leading digital venture builder Blenheim Chalcot, which brings the total investment in the company to £10.5m since its formation in January 2016.
The investment in Edinburgh is enabling key additional capacity and capability to support Modulr’s significant growth.
Modulr accounts provide an alternative to bank accounts for business payments, making them faster, easier and more reliable than legacy technology solutions.
The Edinburgh team will be working to extend the current offering to existing and new customers in alternative lending, payments FinTech, payroll services, finance software providers and marketplaces, as well as into new markets.
Modulr’s digital payments account, which automates and manages payments in real time 24/7, will also be enhanced with new features that will open-up additional integrated ways for customers to get paid, reconcile and make payments instantly, with more functionality to be announced over the coming months.
Having undertaken a review of the various technology hubs across Europe, Modulr chose Edinburgh for its excellent talent pool, support from industry and government bodies such as FinTech Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, as well as its reputation as 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.
A recent review of global FinTech hubs by Deloitte highlighted the city for its thriving FinTech ecosystem.
Modulr identified that to meet its growth and product development targets, it would need to at least double its technology team in 2018 and further in future years. Edinburgh is the ideal home as its developer population grew by eight per cent in the second half of 2017, reaching nearly 20,000.
“As a technology business, building high quality and scalable teams is critical to our current and future growth,” said Modulr CEO Myles Stephenson.
“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.”
Blenheim Chalcot advisory partner & Modulr chair Rob Devey said: “Modulr solves a real pain point – replacing outdated, slow and unreliable manual payment processes with an efficient and manageable payments platform.
“This is an important step on their growth journey and evidence of the growing demand for their solutions. Blenheim Chalcot is delighted to be supporting Modulr as the team expands to Edinburgh.”
In its first two years, Modulr has processed £4.2bn in business payments, while transaction volumes have been growing by an average of 11 per cent month-on-month.
With the opportunities presented by its new office in Edinburgh, Modulr expects to double the size of its team over the last six months of the year, reaching over 100 employees across both its Edinburgh and London offices.