Many business-to-consumer platforms find themselves needing to integrate with a payment API in order to accept credit card payments. However, for platforms that deal with bills and invoices, existing payment APIs often lack the necessary features to accommodate their specific workflows.
Ralph Rogge established Crezco to address this issue.
“Having worked with thousands of small businesses, it was apparent that invoice payments remained inconvenient, especially in comparison to the seamless checkout process for consumer card payments,” Rogge stated. Previously, Rogge was involved with YouLend, a startup offering various funding solutions for merchants and small- and medium-business owners. “Businesses should focus on developing and selling products, rather than spending time and resources setting up bill and invoice payments. Crezco simplifies these payments.”
So, does Crezco deliver on its promise to make payments easier? It certainly appears so.
Crezco specializes in building workflows for collecting bill payments, specifically account-to-account bill collection workflows. This allows payments, including overseas transfers, to be made directly from one account to another without involving transaction intermediaries like card networks.
With Crezco, businesses can benefit from automatic invoice reconciliation integrated with their existing accounting software, tools for generating payment links, collecting recurring payments, and splitting payments between multiple accounts. Crezco also provides a built-in fraud detection system and “instant” payment notifications via the web and mobile.
“It’s not about substituting card payments with something cheaper, but replacing manual bank transfers with something more convenient,” Rogge explained. “Account-to-account and real-time payments represent the future and will see increasing adoption country-by-country. Crezco’s role is to connect these international payment rails to a single API for our partners and their customers, ultimately making it simple for businesses to send and receive payments, both domestically and internationally, saving time and money.”
Image Credits: Crezco
Crezco operates within a competitive landscape, with notable competitors such as Intuit, Wise, Brite Payments, TrueLayer, Plaid, Melio, and Tink (acquired by Visa for $2 billion).
Rogge believes that Crezco’s fraud prevention technology sets it apart, among other capabilities.
“In addition to using account-to-account for processing payments, Crezco leverages open banking to enhance its fraud systems by analyzing historic bank transactions,” Rogge highlighted. “Most tools rely on the same few data points, cross-checked against public datasets, such as government sanction lists. Open banking provides 10 years of every historic credit and debit transaction.”
Crezco claims to have over 10,000 active customers and aims to significantly expand this figure through a partnership with Xero, the U.K. accounting tech firm. Crezco will replace Wise, with which Xero previously had a deal for embedded bill payment solutions.
Investors have shown confidence in Crezco’s trajectory. Today, the company announced that MMC Ventures and 13books have invested $12 million in its Series A round, bringing Crezco’s total funding to $18 million. Rogge plans to utilize the proceeds to enhance Crezco’s accounts-to-accounts product and increase the size of its team from 25 to 45.
“The structural tailwinds in business-to-business payments are significant,” Rogge emphasized, “including the mandatory adoption of electronic invoicing, the growing use of accounting software and business-to-business platforms globally, the rising trend of accounts-to-accounts payments and open banking, and the ongoing increase in cross-border payments.”