Railsbank comes to Australia via tie-up with challenger bank Volt

Railsbank, a UK-based Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform provider, has launched in Australia via a partnership with one of the country’s challenger banks, Volt.

The geographical expansion comes thanks to last year’s $37 million fundraise to facilitate Railsbank’s global growth.

Railsbank says it considers Australia “a highly strategic market” and the collaboration with Volt, the country’s first neo bank, gives it local knowledge and capabilities.

Volt will engage with Railsbank’s global network of partners and customers to create a broader BaaS solution in Australia. It says this will enable companies to prototype, launch and scale financial products within their own customer experience.

Earlier, Volt partnered with Microsoft for the deployment of a new BaaS platform, Volt 2.0.

“The embedded finance market in Australia is in its infancy, but both Railsbank and Volt believe it is set for rapid growth over the coming years,” the two companies state.

Nigel Verdon, co-founder and CEO of Railsbank, says: “This deal has a personal resonance for me as one of my ancestors, Sir George Verdon, was general manager and a founding father of the ANZ Bank, so it’s good to be back in Australia again!”

Verdon continues: “What we bring to the table is represented by deconstructed financial components, tools for product managers, and APIs to allow anybody to come into our toolset to access our consumers and customers for distribution.

These can then be reconstructed into financial use cases. This is what Apple did with iTunes. They deconstructed the music industry and changed the economics of the industry.”