real-time-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.
The Quiet Software Layer Rewiring How Banks Move Money
Finzly does not ask a bank to rip out its core. It slips in beside it, gathers a thicket of payment rails into one system, and turns years-long modernization into a sequence of smaller, safer moves.
The Quiet Company Behind the Card in Your Wallet
Most people will never see i2c's name at checkout. Yet its configurable software helps banks and fintechs decide how cards behave, how money moves and what happens when a transaction looks wrong.
The Bank You Use Without Knowing Its Name
Cross River sits behind some of fintech's most familiar names, turning bank accounts, loans, cards and real-time payments into software building blocks. Its wager is that the most valuable bank of the internet age may be the one customers rarely see.
Customers Bank
Customers Bank grew from a troubled $200 million community lender into a nearly $26 billion national bank by choosing specialists over branches. Now it is testing whether real-time payments and AI can make relationship banking move at software speed.
Milio
Milio (YC W23) is a Colombian fintech building real-time, account-to-account payment infrastructure for Latin America. Through a single API, banks, fintechs, and enterprises can move money between accounts in seconds - handling collections, disbursements, cross-border transfers, and treasury automation while cutting transaction costs by up to 80%.
Finmo
Finmo is a Singapore-based fintech building a Treasury Operating System (TOS) - a single, API-driven platform that unifies global payments, multi-currency accounts, cash visibility and forecasting, FX risk management, and working-capital optimisation for finance teams. Founded in 2021 and led by CEO David Hanna, the company holds payment licenses across multiple markets and raised an oversubscribed US$18.5 million Series A in February 2025, bringing total funding to roughly US$27 million.
Tarabut
Tarabut (formerly Tarabut Gateway) is the MENA region's first and largest regulated open banking platform, connecting a network of banks and fintechs through a universal API. Founded in Bahrain by Abdulla Almoayed and now headquartered in Riyadh, the company provides banking-as-a-service, embedded finance, account-to-account payments, and data-driven credit tools that let financial institutions and businesses build personalized financial products across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.
Thunes
Thunes is a Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company that operates a proprietary Direct Global Network connecting businesses to bank accounts, mobile wallets, cards and stablecoin wallets in more than 130 countries and 80-plus currencies. Spun out of TransferTo in 2016 and led by co-founder and CEO Peter De Caluwe, Thunes powers real-time money movement for gig-economy platforms, super-apps, banks, remittance companies and PSPs, backed by its in-house SmartX Treasury System and Fortress Compliance Platform. In 2026 Juniper Research ranked it among the top three cross-border payments leaders alongside Swift and Visa.
Fiserv
Fiserv is a Milwaukee-based financial technology company that provides payment processing, core banking software, and merchant services to banks, credit unions, businesses, and consumers around the world. Formed in 1984 and transformed by its 2019 acquisition of First Data, it runs the Clover point-of-sale platform, the Carat enterprise commerce operating system, and account-processing systems that power a large share of everyday transactions - from a corner cafe swiping a card to a regional bank settling deposits overnight.
Kickfin
Kickfin is an Austin-based fintech that automates how restaurants and hospitality businesses calculate and pay out tips. Instead of managers counting cash and stuffing envelopes at the end of each shift, Kickfin pushes gratuities in real time straight to employees' existing bank accounts - no cash, no cards, no waiting. Founded in 2017, the company was the first end-to-end digital tip management platform and has since paid out more than $2 billion to over 250,000 restaurant workers, integrating with major POS and payroll systems to eliminate manual uploads and reduce tip errors.
Increase
Increase is a banking infrastructure company that gives technology companies a programmatic way to store, move, and reconcile money. Through a single set of APIs it exposes the core U.S. payment rails - ACH, wires, real-time payments, FedNow, checks, and cards - with direct network connections and transparent access to the underlying data. Founded in 2020 by Stripe's first employee Darragh Buckley and based in Bend, Oregon, Increase is self-funded, became profitable in 2025, and processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments each year for fintechs like Ramp, Check, and Pipe.
RS Software
RS Software is a payments-focused technology company headquartered in Kolkata, India, with a US office in Milpitas, California. Founded by Raj Jain, the firm has spent more than three decades building payment infrastructure for banks, processors, networks and central institutions. It is the team that engineered core pieces of India's public payments stack, including the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) for NPCI, and today offers a suite of cloud-native, API-led products for real-time payments, bill payments, switching, fraud and risk under a Payment Platform as a Service model.
Astra
Astra is a San Francisco-based fintech that gives developers a single API to move money instantly between bank accounts and debit cards. Built on rails like Visa Direct, RTP, FedNow and ACH, its platform lets fintechs, banks and enterprises embed instant disbursements, account funding and accelerated transfers without building their own payments stack - going live in about 30 days instead of six months. Founded in 2016 by Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan, Astra has processed more than $1 billion in lifetime payments and is backed by FPV Ventures, Nyca Partners and others.
Interchecks
Interchecks is a New York-based payments infrastructure company that moves money fast and safely for high-volume businesses. Through a single API and a no-code Payer Portal, it powers both funding (pay-by-bank deposits, account funding) and payouts (push-to-card, real-time payments, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, and checks), layered with built-in risk controls and 1099 tax compliance. Its platform is used across online gaming, prediction markets, on-demand payroll, and digital banking, and the company says it has processed more than $50B in transactions.
MovoCash, Inc.
MovoCash, Inc. (MOVO) is a Palo Alto-based financial technology company founded in 2014 by veteran financial-industry entrepreneur Eric Solis. MOVO offers an on-demand mobile banking app that lets people instantly create FDIC-insured accounts and disposable virtual debit cards, send peer-to-peer payments, pay bills, and make contactless purchases from their phone - even without a traditional bank account. Built on its patented HyperBIN digital-token technology and delivered with Mastercard and Coastal Community Bank, MOVO positions itself as a 'digital cash' network that blends payment cards, bank accounts, and mobile money movement.
Turquoise Health
Turquoise Health is a San Diego health-tech company building the operating system for healthcare contracts and payments. It turns the messy, hidden world of payer and provider pricing - machine-readable files, claims, contracts and Medicare benchmarks - into clear, auditable rates and AI-readable contracts, so that buying and paying for care could one day be as straightforward as any other transaction. More than 280 organizations, including major health systems, national payers, pharma companies and brokers, use the platform.
Instawork
Instawork is an AI-powered on-demand staffing platform that connects businesses with vetted hourly workers across hospitality, warehousing, food service, retail, and light industrial sectors. Operating in 400+ cities across the U.S. and Canada, the company uses over 2 billion data signals to match businesses with pre-vetted workers, achieving a 98% worker show rate and filling 90% of jobs within 24 hours — metrics that traditional staffing agencies rarely approach. Founded in 2015 and backed by Y Combinator, Benchmark, Greylock, and TCV, Instawork has raised $171M and serves 15,000+ businesses, with a network of 10M+ workers. The platform handles everything from a single catering shift to large-scale distribution center operations.
Nium
Nium is a San Francisco- and Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company that lets banks, fintechs, and businesses move money across more than 220 markets via a single API. It runs one of the largest real-time payout networks in the world, supporting payouts in 100+ currencies and instant settlement in 100+ markets.