Democratizing Access to Financial Products for Everyone

Duy Vo
Posted by Duy Vo | Oct 8, 2021

I’m proud to announce our $16 milion series A investment today, led by CM Ventures. As valuable partners, the CM Ventures team shares our vision of building the first distributed financial infrastructure to enable any organization to launch a financial product in a few days. We are fortunate to work with investors who believe in our people and mission create a more compassionate, socially-just, and empathetic financial ecosystem

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us how critical modern infrastructure is to our economy. It has accelerated the world’s embrace of digital and has given the Productfy team a deeper appreciation for how impactful our work is in leading the transformation of the way financial products and services are built… for good.

The need to simplify access to financial products has also accelerated, with consumers and businesses demanding digital pathways away from brick and mortar banks during the pandemic. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, and there is tremendous potential for fintech to play a central role in bridging the growing global economic equality gap. 

While blockchain and crypto dominate the mindshare for decentralized finance (DeFi), there’s still a massive need for companies like Productfy to offer “traditional” financial products in a distributed and decentralized ecosystem. Underserved and underbanked communities across Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America are in dire need of digital products and services tailored to their needs. In the United States, according to Federal Reserve data, the lack of access to financial services is especially prevalent among Black and Hispanic demographics, where as of 2019 a respective 32 percent and 22 percent were reported as underbanked. All of this is about to change for the better.

We aspire to be a product-led organization and we believe a key to our success is deep empathy for our clients and partners. In less than 12 months, Productfy has grown from $280,000 of pre-seed funding into a flourishing business that, since January, has seen eight clients add over 150,000 users into production. We have also made significant progress in growing our network of partners by forging strategic alliances with future-leaning companies such as Marqeta, Equifax, Stearns Bank, and Envestnet | Yodlee.

Users in production graph

Democratizing access means lowering as many barriers to adoption as possible for our partners. We're building towards a model that will make financial products and services even more ubiquitous by enabling any non-bank organization to launch a card program with our white label web and mobile responsive applications. 

White label web and mobile applicationFinally and most importantly, our people and our culture are the most important building blocks — the social capital powering everything we do. We’ve achieved the improbable because we have amazingly talented, mission-driven individuals who strive to build a more empathetic, compassionate, and socially-just financial ecosystem. 

Productfy’s world-class team of operators and innovators are simultaneously witnessing, experiencing, and developing for a future that is evolving faster than any of us have ever seen. We hire for diversity of thought, cultural background, and experience because we believe diversity teaches us empathy. And we are just getting started!

Join us!

 

---read our press release---

 

Productfy Raises $16 Million in Series A Funding, Announces Card Issuance As a Service

The investment furthers the company’s mission to offer a fully distributed financial and banking infrastructure

10/8/2021—Productfy, a Banking as a Service platform that provides embedded financial products for fintechs and brand innovators, today announced $16M in Series A funding led by CM Ventures, with participation by existing investors Point72 Ventures, 500 Startups, and Envestnet | Yodlee.

The banking as a service platform has expanded its suite of partnerships to further unify and power the embedded finance ecosystem for developers and innovators. In addition to partnering with modern card issuing platform Marqeta, card fulfillment partner Arroweye, MasterCard, financial data provider Envestnet | Yodlee, and data, technology, and analytics company Equifax, the company has forged a strategic partnership with Stearns Bank National Association as it develops expanded access to money movement, digital banking, and card issuance products via easily embeddable APIs, widgets, and pre-approved customer interfaces.  

“We see massive parallels in what Productfy is building and larger movements in distributed and decentralized finance across the industry. This focus on simplifying an otherwise complicated process with multiple bank partners, data, and card vendors is a herculean task that - looking back in a few years - will be a watershed moment in distributed financial infrastructure.” said Vagan Khranyan, Managing Partner of CM Ventures. 

“We are thrilled to welcome CM Ventures as investors who deeply understand the intersection of embedded finance, banking as a service, and the potential to make financial products and services accessible to any brand. We can accelerate our efforts to go beyond building out world class tools to integrating compliance, program management, and customer service into a unified architecture that acts as a distributed backbone for a market that wants to unlock financial innovation and bring products to market in weeks, not months or years,” said Duy Vo, founder and CEO of Productfy.

“Productfy’s solution is unlike any we’ve seen in the market. The combination of world-class architecture from a technical founder, API design, program management, and compliance with a maniacal focus on enabling any non-bank company to easily launch a financial product to market is what sets Productfy apart in a competitive ecosystem,” said Josh Hofer, Chief Risk and Information Security Officer at Stearns Bank. “Aligning our technology roadmap with Productfy’s enables both companies to succeed by making banking products more accessible and scalable for the entire ecosystem, and we’re excited to be part of this journey.”

Productfy’s partnership with Stearns Bank is enabling clients to launch innovative money movement and card programs with stacked workflows and unified due diligence, eliminating months of development, compliance hurdles, and third party integrations.``The amount of friction to get to market with a financial product or service today is staggering”, said Thomson Nguyen, CEO of Hatch. “The technology itself is just one component, but what’s just as important is the self-service enablement the Productfy team provides for founders to help them navigate the regulatory landscape and commercialize their use case.” 

With the new funding, Productfy will further scale its offerings and compliance as a service capabilities and continue innovating on it’s core data and card issuance offering, with a focus on adding additional integrations and partnerships in the coming quarters. For more information, please visit Productfy.io

About Productfy
Productfy enables companies to launch financial products to market in as little as three weeks. With embeddable modules for payments, deposits, and card issuance backed by unified due diligence and an omni purpose general ledger, companies have access to a unified platform that provides the building blocks to accelerate innovation and launch world-class products. With Productfy, developers can configure in hours, integrate in days, and go from idea to full stack deployment in as little as 3 weeks. For more information, please visit Productfy.io 

​​About CM Ventures:

CM Ventures is a global venture capital firm focused on early stage tech companies. The portfolio includes: Buyk, an instant grocery delivery in the US, Speechify, an intelligent text-to-speech audio-reader, Codesignal, a skills-based assessment platform for hiring developers, Atom Finance, a modern investing tool, Krisp, a noise-canceling tool, and more. The investment team at CM Ventures utilises an internally developed proprietary data platform for sourcing promising startups and provides support to portfolio companies with insights and benchmarking. 

For more info about the firm, please visit:  www.cmventures.com



Press Contacts:

Aaron Huang

aaron@Productfy.io

Alyona Sukharevskaya

pr@cmventures.com