Ryft, the revolutionary PSD2-compliant payments system, has announced its receipt of a UK licence from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) following a £1.2 million seed round raise in August last year. The authorisation of the licence opens up opportunities for Ryft to become a regulated payment facilitator with some of the world’s biggest acquirers.

The FCA licence will allow Ryft to expand its in-house compliance team led by the new Head of Compliance and Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO), Grant Campbell. This will allow the business to facilitate more complex payments, enabling B2B digital and marketplace platforms to monetise payments across their technology as well as independently broker relationships with other organisations. 

The Ryft solution processes payments and then automatically diverts funds to merchants and sub-merchants the next working day. Think Stripe Connect without the high fees and lengthy payout wait times. The solution is completely PSD2 compliant. Ryft’s end-to-end solution handles everything from accepting online payments, verifying and onboarding merchants, to splitting up the payments however a business wants. This is all done through easy-to-use API documentation to remove complexity and fast-track the development cycle.

The idea for Ryft came from best friends and co-founders Sadra Hosseini and Alex Mackenzie’s first business Butlr, a mobile ordering marketplace app for pubs and bars. They scaled this business up rapidly during the pandemic, reaching over a million customers and 500 active venues at their peak before the platform was acquired. They identified a gap in the market for the profitability of microtransactions and fast payouts and there Ryft was born. Many marketplaces are caught unaware of PSD2 compliance, presenting a unique opportunity to capture market share by presenting a solution that fixes this and takes the administerial headaches away from finance teams.

Ryft solves the current problems in the payment marketplaces of multiple sub merchants resulting in large periods of wasted time and multiple processes across different platforms. Ryft streamlines all of these processes in a singular efficient platform, protecting employees, protecting businesses from FCA fines, ensuring anti-money laundering rules are followed and reducing the associated risks for marketplaces and their onboarding processes.

Sadra Hosseini, CEO and Founder of Ryft: “We are both incredibly proud to have secured our FCA licence after a year and a half. This furthers our ability to provide support to marketplaces and merchants in the industry. Ryft was created to handle everything so your business doesn’t have to.”