Company Profile · Fintech Infrastructure
Pomelo.
The London-and-Singapore fintech that turned payments into a single, white-label platform - rails, merchant services and card issuing under one API.
The London-and-Singapore fintech that turned payments into a single, white-label platform - rails, merchant services and card issuing under one API.
Pomelo Group - trading in the UK as Pomelo Pay - builds the payments infrastructure other companies would rather rent than construct. Its product is a unified, API-based Payment Platform-as-a-Service: a single system that hands financial institutions, fintechs and large enterprises ready-to-use payment rails, merchant onboarding, transaction monitoring and a spread of acceptance methods, all of it white-labelled so the client keeps its own brand on the front.
The pitch is deliberately unglamorous. Instead of chasing consumers, Pomelo sells the plumbing - the connectors, the compliance, the merchant dashboard - to the institutions that serve them. A bank that would need two years and a large engineering team to launch a modern merchant product can, in Pomelo's telling, do it in a fraction of the time by plugging into the platform. It is infrastructure that most cardholders will never see and never name, which is precisely the point.
Figures reflect company and press disclosures around the 2024 leadership transition. Pomelo reached nearly $2 billion in annualised processing volume under founding CEO Vincent Choi before he moved to the advisory board.
I'm proud to have led the company from zero to nearly $2 billion in annualized processing volume.
Banks, fintechs, enterprises and small merchants - two audiences, one platform.
Financial institutions, fintechs, corporations and public-sector bodies license Pomelo's white-label stack to launch merchant services and payment acceptance under their own brand. Named clients include Bank of Maldives and Dialog Axiata.
In the UK, small and mid-sized businesses use Pomelo Pay directly to take payments in person, online, remotely and via gateway - without buying expensive point-of-sale hardware. Luxury group Soneva even added crypto at its resorts.
The problem Pomelo sets out to solve is fragmentation. Payment acceptance has splintered into a thicket of methods - cards, QR codes, tap-to-pay, wallets, payment links, even cryptocurrency - each with its own integration, compliance burden and reporting quirks. For an institution, stitching those together is slow and expensive. Pomelo's answer is to unify onboarding, acceptance and merchant data behind one interface, so a client adds a payment method the way it would flip a switch.
Ready-to-use payment rails for taking money in person, online, remotely and through a gateway.
Onboarding, management, transaction monitoring and reporting from a single dashboard.
Modular microservices with instant connectors, tokenisation and white-label customisation.
QR codes, tap-to-pay (NFC), payment links and invoicing across an omnichannel setup.
Acquiring and issuing plus fund-control, built on Mastercard and Discover credentials.
Bitcoin and Ethereum acceptance via QR and links, through a partnership with TripleA.
The business model is B2B and platform-first. Pomelo licenses its white-label system to institutions and earns through platform fees and transaction-based economics, rather than selling directly to shoppers. In the UK it also serves merchants directly under the Pomelo Pay brand, giving it both a wholesale and a retail channel into the same technology.
Its defensibility is less about any single feature and more about accumulated permissions. Pomelo Group is authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority to issue electronic money. It holds PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider certification and runs on SOC2, ISO 27001, ISO 27017 and NIST CSF-aligned infrastructure. It carries Mastercard acquiring and issuing credentials and Discover processor status.
Each of those approvals is slow to earn and expensive to maintain - which is exactly why a client would rather rent them. In payments, compliance is not paperwork bolted onto the product; it is a large part of the product itself.
The company's expertise is concentrated where the two hardest problems in payments meet: regulated money movement and the messy, market-by-market reality of acceptance in Southeast Asia. Its architecture is built as composable microservices, so a client can take the pieces it needs and skip the rest.
Bars are indexed for visual comparison, not to a shared scale. Funding total per third-party trackers; revenue estimates are approximate and not officially disclosed.
The payments world is crowded, but Pomelo occupies a specific corner of it. Where Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.com sell merchants a direct gateway, Pomelo sells institutions a white-label platform to run their own.
| Dimension | Pomelo | Typical gateway (Stripe / Adyen) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary buyer | Banks, fintechs, enterprises | Merchants directly |
| Branding | White-label - client's brand | Provider's brand |
| Shape | Modular microservices, pick-and-choose | Integrated stack |
| Focus market | UK + Southeast Asia | Global, US/EU-centric |
| Extras | Merchant onboarding + monitoring built in | Add-ons / separate products |
Comparison is illustrative. Direct alternatives also include Rapyd, Paysend and Thunes.
One of the hardest things for any early-stage company to achieve is recruitment of strong talent.
Vincent Choi, Simon Verraest and Neil Cuthbert launch to help UK retailers take QR and wallet payments without POS hardware.
The company opens a Singapore office and begins its push into Southeast Asian markets.
Authorised by the UK FCA to issue e-money; opens a Vietnam office and gains Discover processor status.
Secures Mastercard acquiring and issuing credentials, broadening its card capabilities.
Partners with TripleA to accept BTC and ETH, with Soneva as first client; opens a Thailand office.
Ex-Thunes CEO and Paysend COO takes over from co-founder Vincent Choi, who moves to the advisory board.
Buys the Y Combinator-backed fintech to add e-commerce checkout technology - and its founding team.
Co-founded Pomelo in 2017 and still leads its technology as Chief Technology Officer.
Founding CEO who grew the company to ~$2B in annualised volume; now on the strategic advisory board.
Joined as CEO in April 2024. Formerly COO of Paysend and CEO of Thunes; 25+ years across Southeast Asian payments.
Co-founder Neil Cuthbert completes the founding trio. The 2025 Arrow Checkout deal also brought in a new product chief - Neo Liat Beng, Arrow's co-founder, now Pomelo's Chief Product Officer.
Enables Bitcoin and Ethereum acceptance with settlement in fiat, removing volatility risk for merchants.
Acquiring and issuing credentials underpin Pomelo's card products.
Processor status enabling Discover card acceptance across the platform.
Financial-institution client running on Pomelo's payment platform.
Enterprise/telecom client using Pomelo's technology.
Luxury resort group; first business to enable crypto acceptance in the Maldives and Thailand.
There are several unrelated fintechs called Pomelo - a US "send now, pay later" startup and an Argentine payments firm - which is why this one goes by Pomelo Group.
It began as Pomelo Pay, letting UK retailers take QR-code payments without buying card terminals.
Its first crypto customer was a Maldives luxury resort group, letting guests pay for villas in Bitcoin.
Two Arrow Checkout founders came from Grab and Tencent before joining Pomelo.
Its London home is 20 Canada Square, in the heart of Canary Wharf.
The name is a citrus fruit - the largest in the citrus family.
Pomelo provides a unified, white-label Payment Platform-as-a-Service - giving financial institutions, fintechs and enterprises ready-to-use payment rails, merchant onboarding and management, transaction monitoring, and multiple acceptance methods through one API.
No. This is Pomelo Group Limited (formerly Pomelo Pay), a London- and Singapore-based payments infrastructure company. It is unrelated to the US "send now, pay later" remittance startup or the Argentine payments firm that also use the Pomelo name.
It was founded in 2017 by Vincent Choi, Simon Verraest and Neil Cuthbert. Steve Vickers became CEO in April 2024; Simon Verraest remains CTO, and Vincent Choi sits on the strategic advisory board.
Pomelo is headquartered at 20 Canada Square in London's Canary Wharf, with a regional headquarters in Singapore and offices in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City.
Yes. Pomelo Group Limited is authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority to issue electronic money (FRN 928018) and holds PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider certification.