Rivero, a Swiss regtech specialising in digitalisation and automation of payment processes, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by 6 Degrees Capital and Inference Partners, with participation from Kraken Ventures (also backed Shield and Rally in the past), Seed X Liechtenstein, the venture arm of PostFinance and angel investor and former COO of Adyen, Robert Kraal, together with many payment executives.
Rivero aims to simplify payment operations for the highly regulated industry, filling a gap in the market for fraud recovery, dispute management, and payment scheme compliance solutions.
Thomas Müller, co-founder of Rivero, spoke to TFN about how the company works and what it plans to bring to the payments sector.
First funding for global expansion
Discussing the deployment of investments, Müller emphasises, “The raised funds will be used to substantially accelerate our business development efforts across the relevant European markets and beyond. Additionally, it will enable Rivero to extend its product offering to issuing banks. We’re working towards serving a global customer base and helping issuers banks to tackle additional challenges beyond the scope of our current products.”
The founders of Rivero – Fatemeh Nikayin and Thomas Müller with experience in the financial industry faced challenges around card payment operations. Nikayin has a background in payments and research with international experience in consulting banking digitalisation projects while Müller has a background in cybersecurity and software engineering. They got to know each other working for a large issuing bank in Switzerland and founded the startup in 2019.
Inspired by this struggle, they came up with the idea of Rivero to solve challenges, especially the compliance requirements related to payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard.
Fatemeh Nikayin, co-founder, added, “This funding represents more than financial support; it’s a partnership with investors who understand and resonate with our vision and global ambitions.”
Simplifies payment operations
Rivero aims to simplify payment operations for the highly regulated payments industry, bridging the gap in the market for fraud recovery, dispute management, and payment scheme compliance solutions. Leveraging the benefits of SaaS, Rivero’s products cater to all players in the payment ecosystem, but in particular to issuing banks.
It is the first Swiss regtech to be selected for the Visa Fintech Partner Connect programme.
Commenting on the investment, Thibault D’hondt, Partner at 6 Degrees Capital, said: “Globally, banks spend billions of dollars on scheme compliance and payment dispute management. Rivero is the first of its kind to offer a suite of SaaS solutions to help banks and processors address the challenge. We have been truly impressed with the exceptional vision of the management and believe this investment will allow Rivero to become a global market leader for payment operations.”
Endre Sagi, General Partner of Inference Partners, added: “The value chain of payments is highly fragmented, and while there are initiatives to address this challenge on the acquiring side, the issuing side has seen much less innovation. With its suite of payment solutions, Rivero enables card-issuing financial institutions to vertically integrate their fragmented payment value chain. By addressing this largely untapped opportunity, we believe Rivero is perfectly positioned to become an essential part of modern payment infrastructure.”
SaaS products in its kitty
The Zurich-based company offers two unique SaaS product offerings focused on making costly and manual payment operations seamless. Firstly, Kajo is touted to be the only solution on the market for payment scheme compliance and enables all licensees of payment networks to minimise the effort and the risks involved in this process.
Amiko, its second product, is the only SaaS solution that digitalises the entire fraud recovery and dispute process. As per the company, this helps issuing banks efficiently manage this process while offering a unique self-service experience to their customers. Amiko empowers banks to promote consumer protection of card payments to their customers without being concerned with increasing volume or costs.
Müller concludes, “We believe the value chain of payments is highly fragmented, meaning banks are too dependent on multiple 3rd parties when it comes to processing payments. The existing and future products all aim to support the bank to become more independent and more vertically integrated when it comes to payments. Meaning to streamline their value chain to save costs and to innovate faster.”
