a2a-payments
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The Australian Who Built a British Card-Killer - Then Sold It Back to Australia
Banked spent eight years trying to build a payments network cheaper than cards. In May 2026 National Australia Bank bought the whole thing - and pointed it at home.
Palomma
Palomma is a Medellin-based fintech building an AI-native banking platform for real estate in Latin America, starting with rent. It deploys AI agents that handle leasing, sales, and collections for property managers across WhatsApp, SMS, and phone calls 24/7, then layers on payment collection and disbursement to own the flow of rent and monetize it through credit and insurance products. Founded in the Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch, the company originally launched as a frictionless Pay-by-Bank API for LatAm merchants before pivoting to real estate.
Clerq
Clerq is a New York-based fintech building an account-to-account (A2A) bank payments platform for high-ticket transactions. It lets merchants - starting with automotive and powersports dealerships - accept low-cost, guaranteed payments pulled directly from a customer's bank account, with card-like ease and no chargeback, fraud, or funding risk. Founded in 2022 by former Citadel and JP Morgan investors Truett Dwyer and Ben Markowitz, Clerq raised a $12M Series A led by 645 Ventures in October 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Prometeo
Prometeo is a Latin American fintech-infrastructure company that turns the region's fragmented banking landscape into a single API. Through one integration, businesses can validate bank accounts, aggregate financial data, and move money across banks and borders. Founded in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2018, Prometeo has connected thousands of banking channels across more than a dozen countries in the Americas and raised a $13M Series A in 2024 led by Antler Elevate with PayPal Ventures and Samsung Next.
Truett Dwyer
Truett Dwyer is co-founder and co-CEO of Clerq, a New York account-to-account payments platform built for high-ticket transactions in industries like automotive, powersports, and equipment where 3% card fees and chargebacks eat margins. A Wharton graduate who spent his early career investing at Citadel, Summit Partners, and Blackstone, he and co-founder Ben Markowitz approached payments from first principles and chose to embed inside merchants' checkout workflows rather than build a consumer app. In October 2025 Clerq raised a $12M Series A led by 645 Ventures, bringing its total to $21M, on the back of 6x revenue growth and marquee dealership and marketplace clients.
Lawrence Herman
Lawrence Herman is the Chief Financial Officer and AI Strategy Leader at Cents, the all-in-one operating system for laundromats and dry cleaners. A payments and fintech finance veteran, he has steered the books at Dwolla, Accrete, and Paxful, and logged earlier stretches at Mastercard, American Express, Dataminr, EY, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Harvard-trained in economics, he is known for calm during industry cycles, a preacher's zeal for financial literacy, and a habit of walking into every meeting with three discussion points and three asks.