London: Toqio has announced a seed round of €8M from Seaya Ventures, Speedinvest and SIX FinTech Ventures, to scale its global financial SaaS platform. The company makes it easier for any business to quickly launch financial solutions, removing the need to build and manage complex software solutions through its platform and marketplace.
Toqio was founded in 2019 by serial entrepreneurs Eduardo Martínez and Michael Galvin, who previously built a small business SaaS startup, Geniac, which was acquired by Grant Thornton. They are joined by a founding team that supported their previous ventures, bringing together SaaS and financial technology experts.
Collectively, they are solving a problem seen across the FinTech market, where businesses looking to launch new products are torn between building in-house or buying a solution. Toqio provides a smart and connected way to create and deliver financial products.
Eduardo Martínez, Co-Founder and CEO, of Toqio, commented “After exiting the last business we kept getting pulled towards FinTech. With our backgrounds in SaaS and operating in the FinTech space, many opportunities came to us from banks, startups and big brands. We kept seeing the same problem, and no solution in the market. Regulation has changed and Banking-as-a-Service provided the plumbing for new solutions, but everyone was still building solutions from scratch. It felt like the same situation that has occurred again and again in the software industry before a new sector emerged, and we had an opportunity to be a first-mover to deliver a meaningful solution, with FinTech SaaS.”
Martínez continued, “Businesses and banks are looking to innovate in the FinTech sector, but to date, they have had to create and maintain complex software solutions to do this. This has also kept smaller niche businesses out of the market. We don’t want FinTech to end up like banking just with a new set of big incumbents trying to take control of financial services. We want to level the playing field.”
Toqio has a modular approach so customers can use pre-built products to rapidly create personalised applications and go from concept to market in just six weeks. The flexibility of the Toqio platform allows clients to launch highly specific use cases on a single, shared infrastructure.
This includes their digital banking, card and financing solutions, which are the simplest, quickest and most efficient way to deploy a fully digital financial proposition to the market. Toqio’s solution also comes with a marketplace, which acts as an orchestration layer connecting the leading financial services and FinTech platforms directly into Toqio. Finally, the company provides a management portal offering clients end to end customer management.
Toqio, which is headquartered in London and Madrid, is already working with customers across Europe. The company can support financial institutions, FinTech startups, banks, and corporate brands looking to launch and monetise best in class financial solutions in their ecosystem. The funding will enable Toqio to scale quickly through its significant pipeline of corporate brands and financial institutions. Customers already include new Spanish bank Crealsa, business banking service Wamo in Malta and alternative business lender Just Cash Flow in the UK.
According to The Business Research Company, the global FinTech market is expected to be worth $325bn by 2030. Non-banking financial services, such as niche FinTech solutions, will grow 48 per cent year on year, and open banking revenues for corporates and larger businesses will reach $48bn by 2026.
Aristotelis Xenofontos, Principal at Seaya Ventures, said, ”We have spent many years following the Embedded Finance space and finally found the missing piece, a seamless enabler that glues everything together. Toqio is a truly end-to-end platform that provides a complete plug and play bank and allows any organisation to offer a full suite of digital financial services in a rapid, painless, future-proof and low-cost way. We are delighted to back Toqio’s outstanding team and support them in accelerating the impressive commercial traction they have already achieved in such a short time.”
Stefan Klestil, General Partner at Speedinvest, added, “We’ve seen the rise of neo-banks, the change of regulations across multiple markets, and now we’re starting to see traditional businesses and big brands looking to embed financial products within their existing offerings. Financial services are going to change and expand at an unprecedented rate, and Toqio will be instrumental in enabling it. A platform needs to exist to support the demand to innovate in this space, and we’re excited to support Eduardo, Michael and the team, in becoming the go-to middle layer connecting companies and BaaS providers to enable financial innovation.”
Yin Yan, Senior Investment Manager at SIX FinTech Ventures, commented, “We are excited about the vast possibilities that embedded finance brings. Not only due to its ability to enable speedy and streamlined deployments of new financial propositions for FinTechs, banks and non-financial businesses but also due to its potential of creating new value propositions that better serve clients through the use of data. Toqio, with its strong team and modular tech platform and marketplace, is ideally positioned to become a category-defining player in the space.”
The seed investment will be used to expand the Toqio platform and scale the team from 19 to over 100, across product, sales and more. The company will be working to secure a leading market position in Europe and will enter the US market.
