Infinicept + Mastercard + MissionOG = A Milestone for Embedded Payments

We were there when it started.

How often can you really say that in life? In our case, it was an Electronic Transactions Association board meeting in April 2011, when Mastercard and their peers laid out their plans to launch the “payment facilitator” model in July 2011. In that moment, Mastercard essentially broke down the walls between fintech and banks. Right away, we knew this was going to be a global phenomenon.

Shortly after that, we started what would become Infinicept. We set out to enable payment facilitators on a global scale. Our first customers were Stripe and Shopify in 2011. We started working with Mastercard in 2012. Our first international project was in the Philippines in 2013. We’ve since explored 25 countries in every region of the world working with Mastercard. Our relationship has gotten deeper over time, further cemented by our participation in their Start Path accelerator program in June 2019.

Today, we are excited to announce that Mastercard is now a global strategic partner and investor in Infinicept. Our new funding round (see the news release here) was led by Mastercard and MissionOG, a top fintech and data services venture firm co-founded by former Mastercard International president and CEO Gene Lockhart.

The new funding will help us accelerate growth and adoption for embedded payments, building upon our base of 250-plus software, banking and fintech customers in 25 countries. We’re using the funds to invest in product innovation and customer success, so we can address the exponential demand for embedded payment services. To put a fine point on that, and brag a little bit, our yearly payments volume has increased 800% as more companies embed payment services to grow their revenues and enhance customer experience.

As many of you know, embedded payments is one of the hottest stories in tech. Analyst Rick Oglesby last year predicted there will be 4,200-plus payment facilitators by 2025, processing more than $15 billion in transaction volume. Last year, 70% of new merchants came through payment facilitators (versus just 15% in 2016). The numbers are staggering in every region of the world. If it turns out to be half that size, it’s a massive opportunity. If it takes twice the time, it’s a massive opportunity.

Infinicept keeps bad guys out of the payment system, and we help the underserved get access. But we don’t do that alone. Together with global industry partners like Mastercard, we’re excited to scale up our unique approach – which delivers “more foresight, more freedom, and more follow-through” to help software and fintech companies get payments going their way. What do we mean by that?

• More foresight – from seasoned payments specialists who know what to watch for and how to get you up and running faster.
• More freedom – to choose your own processor and gateway, to customize the software, and to keep your own data and tokens.
• More follow-through – with dedicated support and faster answers at every stage, from onboarding to admin to future changes.

Looking ahead, we see two significant trends driving faster adoption of embedded payments. First is a shift beyond horizontal payments players, with armies of sales people trying to fill the gap for smaller merchants who needed processing. Now we’re seeing more vertically specific players (medical software, restaurant software, runner sign-ups for races, etc.) who are solving a specialized need with a built-in payments experience. The second trend is amplified in a big way by COVID-19, and that’s a move to support contactless transactions – which means more software with more built-in payments. That may ultimately lead to a greater number of payment facilitators even faster than we anticipated.

There’s another truly important player in today’s announcement, and that’s MissionOG. They are a specialized venture capital firm with deep operating experience in financial services and software. We were introduced to them by one of our early investors, who called them “smart, serious people.” They had a strong appetite for the opportunity, they knew what they were talking about right away, and they introduced us to four CEO-level sales opportunities during the diligence process. They’re clear operators and they’ve proven themselves in spades. (Other institutional investors have been banging down our door, but we haven’t let them in.)

As MissionOG managing partner Andy Newcomb said in today’s release: “Embedded payments are a major growth market, and Infinicept’s unique approach and deep payments expertise are valuable differentiators to deliver on the need.”

We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Mastercard and MissionOG to help more software companies than ever embed payments into their products. Our customers need the ability to get payments up and running on their own terms, without having to do all the work themselves. The traditional approaches involve too many trade-offs – from the costs and risks of DIY to the restrictive, cookie-cutter approaches of other solutions.

We turn all this around with our flexible approach to embedded payments. With Infinicept, software companies can deliver a tailored experience to customers while often generating as much, and sometimes more, revenue from payments as they do from their software. The opportunity in front of us is enormous, and we’re going to invest intelligently and aggressively to put software companies in control of their payments experience – and their payments future.