Form3 welcomes banking giants Lloyds and Nationwide as investors in $33m fundraise

CEO Michael Mueller now counts three major UK banks among his shareholders.

Payments technology provider Form3 has completed its Series C funding round, first announced last month, with the inclusion of banking groups Lloyds and Nationwide.

The banks took part in the $33m fundraise alongside new VC investor 83North and existing investor Draper Esprit, and both banks are also exploring strategic partnerships to use Form3’s payments technology.

With the addition of Lloyds and Nationwide as shareholders, Form3 now has three major financial services groups as investors, with Barclays taking part in the fintech’s Series A in 2017.

“Form3 for us is a really exciting opportunity to contribute to building a new domestic payments architecture for the group,” Otto Benz, director of payments technical services at Lloyds Banking Group told AltFi, pointing to the New Payments Architecture, the UK payments industry’s proposed new way of organising payments between banks.

“Clearly that's a big step for a banking group the size of Lloyds Banking Group, and it's going to be careful as you go, in terms of how we implement that, but that's the strategy, that's why we want to do it because we see the opportunity for our customers in increasing  the security and resilience in our infrastructure.”

Nationwide’s chief operating officer Patrick Eltridge told AltFi that the building society’s payments work with Form3 is still under development and that “there are multiple opportunities around how we might work together and we're looking very carefully at those at the moment, so we expect to be clear about our future plans before too long.”

On Nationwide’s investment in Form3, Eltridge said there was a “compelling difference” between the fintech and other providers in the industry. 

“We've been conducting a very broad review of participants in the payments industry, and we saw the best combination of truly modern cloud-native technology along with an approach and mindset in building an appropriately lean and easy to deploy service built to be highly resilient.”

“We think [Form3] has a great future ahead of it.”

While bringing on so many big industry players as strategic investors might close doors in other areas of financial services, Form3 CEO Michael Mueller told AltFi he’s confident the startup isn’t closing any doors.

“Where banks differentiate is actually more in the front end, and that's clearly not our expertise or domain.”

“What we're seeing is actually that banks benefit the more that come on board our platform, whether through operating leverage or the development of features like the adoption of the new payments architecture.”

And with three major banks already on board, Form3 is well on its way.