Spurred by convenience and the pandemic, the rise of e-commerce, mobile technology, and digital payments have integrated into everyone’s lives and businesses across the world, including the UK.
UK generates 25% in Europe
In data published by BuyShares, UK is the largest digital payment market in Europe, generating 25% of the region’s total digital transaction value (just over $164B), followed closely by Germany, France, and Italy.
With 81.8% of its citizens using online payments in 2019, the UK ranked as the country with the highest share of online payment users globally, as per Statista 2020 FinTech Report.
To capitalise on the opportunity, plenty of companies have emerged in the recent past. One such firm is Rapyd.
Rapyd’s $300M Series D
Based out of London, Rapyd is a payments platform that inserts fintech services into any app and simplifies the complex offering of local payment methods.
The company enables e-commerce merchants, gig platforms, challenger wallets, remittance platforms, and others to break free of their old infrastructure and limitations and create new mobile-friendly solutions.
Just yesterday, the UK FaaS (Fintech-as-a-Service) company secured $300 million (approx £215 million) funding in a Series E round led by Target Global. With this, the company’s valuation triggered to $8.75 billion.
Several new and existing investors including, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Altimeter Capital, Whale Rock Capital, BlackRock Funds, Dragoneer, General Catalyst, Latitude, Durable Capital Partners, Tal Capital, Avid Ventures, and Spark Capital, also participated.
The funding round comes after Rapyd acquires Valitor, European digital payments and issuing company, for $100 million (approx £72 million), and the launch of Rapyd Ventures, the company’s venture arm.
How will the funding be used?
The company plans to use the funding to make more strategic acquisitions to expand in key markets and grow payment products and experiences. Also, the company plans to scale its platform not just across geographies but also across verticals and solutions.
Founded by its three Israeli founders in 2016, Rapyd enables e-commerce merchants, gig platforms, challenger wallets, remittance platforms, and others to break free of their old infrastructure and limitations and create new mobile-friendly solutions.
Well, by 2023, there will be nearly 12M people in the UK whose primary payment method is through their phones, says the report. Besides Rapyd, other companies are also battling out in the global market to capture a fair chunk of market share and cement their position. Who are those? Check out the list below!

Gocardless
Founder/s: Matt Robinson and Hiroki Takeuchi
Funding: £168M
Gocardless aims to take the pain out of getting paid for businesses with recurring revenue. The company has built a proprietary tech platform with the sole purpose of facilitating how recurring payments are collected.
Recently, the UK company has appointed Alexandra Chiaramonti as General Manager of Southern Europe to sustain GoCardless’ rapid growth in the region. Last month, Gocardless partnered with Pennylane, financial management, and accounting platform, to offer SMEs and startups a seamless way to manage and collect recurring payments.
Stripe Payments
Founder/s: John Collison and Patrick Collison
Funding: £1.7B
Stripe is an online payments technology provider with a presence in 20 countries across Europe. The Irish-American fintech helps small, and large companies accept web and mobile payments through its economic infrastructure. Various companies like Salesforce and Facebook use the company’s software to accept online payments and run complex global operations.
The fintech company is reportedly preparing for a stock market debut after appointing a law firm – Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton to explore a listing. Further, Stripe is likely to go with a direct listing rather than an initial public offering.
Square payments
Founder/s: Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey, Tristan O’Tierney
Funding: £380M
Square is a merchant services aggregator and mobile payment company that aims to simplify e-commerce through technology. The digital payment company builds tools to empower businesses and individuals to participate in the economy.
The fintech company just announced that it is acquiring Australian buy now, pay later giant Afterpay in a $29 billion all-stock deal. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
Amazon Pay
Founder/s: Jeff Bezos
Funding: £240M
Amazon Pay is an online payment service that makes e-commerce simple for millions of shoppers and customers. The platform provides businesses with a convenient buying experience to help their customers spend more time shopping and less time checking out.
In the latest development, Amazon may allow users to pay in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as the company is hiring a digital currency and blockchain product lead for its payments team. It’s worth mentioning that the payment platform doesn’t accept cryptocurrencies as payment till now.
PayPal Here
PayPal is a financial service company that provides online payment solutions to its users worldwide. Notably, PayPal Here is a primary business solution for merchants looking for a way to accept all types of payments, including PayPal, for goods and services. The solution allows merchants to process payments from all the major credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal and Venmo accounts.
On the other hand, Venmo is a mobile payment service owned by PayPal as well, which competes with Rapyd. The platform lets users transfer funds to others via a mobile phone app. Recently, the company has reported the Q2 result a few days back. According to the report, Venmo is up by 58% as measured in payment volumes to $58 billion (approx £41.6 billion).