Payments Infrastructure

Adyen is the payments platform of choice for the world's leading companies, including McDonald's, Spotify, Microsoft, Uber, and L'Oréal. Founded in Amsterdam in 2006, Adyen built its technology from scratch on a single platform that handles acquiring, risk management, and processing—eliminating layers of intermediaries that inflate costs and introduce friction. Adyen's unified commerce approach connects online, mobile, and in-person payments so businesses can offer consistent experiences across all touchpoints. The platform supports 250+ payment methods and 150+ transaction currencies, enabling truly global acceptance. Adyen's RevenueProtect risk management system uses machine learning to minimize fraud while maximizing revenue. The company's direct acquiring relationships in key markets provide better authorization rates and lower interchange costs at scale. Adyen for Platforms enables marketplaces and SaaS companies to embed payments and financial services into their products. Adyen Issuing allows businesses to create and manage their own payment cards. Its data-driven insights help enterprise clients optimize their payment stack continuously. The interchange++ pricing model provides full transparency into the cost structure, rewarding high-volume merchants with favorable economics. Adyen is generally suited for mid-market to enterprise businesses processing significant payment volumes.

Airwallex is a global financial infrastructure platform that enables businesses to operate without borders through multi-currency accounts, international payments, and embedded financial services. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex has raised over $900 million and achieved unicorn status, serving over 100,000 businesses across 150+ countries. The platform provides global accounts with local receiving details in 60+ countries, eliminating the need for multiple banking relationships in different markets. International transfers are processed at competitive rates with transparent fees, typically beating traditional bank rates significantly. Airwallex's Borderless Cards offer global spend management with physical and virtual cards in multiple currencies. The platform's API-first architecture enables businesses to embed payments, wallets, and cards into their own products. Connected App Marketplace integrates with Shopify, Xero, QuickBooks, and other business tools. FX conversion at interbank rates helps businesses protect margins on cross-border transactions. Airwallex Payment Acceptance enables businesses to collect payments online in local payment methods across Asia-Pacific and beyond. The platform is particularly strong for businesses expanding into Asia, given its founding team's deep expertise in APAC markets. Airwallex Expense Management provides spend control and visibility across global teams. Regulatory licenses in major jurisdictions ensure compliant operation worldwide.

Braintree is a developer-first payment gateway acquired by PayPal in 2013 that powers payments for companies like Uber, Airbnb, GitHub, and OpenTable. Braintree offers a comprehensive SDK and API for accepting credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and local payment methods through a single integration. Its client SDKs are available for iOS, Android, JavaScript, and all major server-side languages, enabling seamless mobile and web payment experiences. Braintree's Drop-in UI provides a pre-built, customizable payment form that handles PCI compliance out of the box, while the Hosted Fields integration offers pixel-perfect control while keeping sensitive card data off merchant servers. Advanced fraud tools include device fingerprinting, velocity checks, and real-time risk scoring. The Vault feature securely stores customer payment methods for streamlined repeat purchases. Braintree supports multi-currency processing and marketplace payments through its marketplace integration. The platform provides extensive webhook support for real-time payment event notifications. Braintree's sandbox environment faithfully replicates production, enabling thorough testing before going live. Integration with the broader PayPal ecosystem provides access to PayPal's consumer network and additional financial products. Braintree generally offers better rates than standard PayPal and is preferred by development teams needing more control.

Checkout.com is a global payments platform built for digital-first businesses that need high authorization rates, advanced fraud protection, and sophisticated payment orchestration. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, Checkout.com serves major clients including Grab, Wise, Coinbase, Pizza Hut, and Klarna. The platform's core advantage is its proprietary direct acquiring relationships in over 20 markets, enabling higher approval rates than competitors using third-party acquirers. Checkout.com's unified API accepts 20+ local payment methods alongside traditional cards, supporting seamless global expansion. Its Frames product provides PCI-compliant hosted payment fields that can be styled to match any brand identity. The Risk Engine uses machine learning to minimize false positives while catching genuine fraud. Advanced payment orchestration features enable businesses to route transactions intelligently across multiple processors for optimal performance. Checkout.com's Analytics provides granular transaction-level data with custom reporting capabilities. The platform's issuing product enables businesses to issue physical and virtual cards. Checkout.com is particularly strong for fintech companies, marketplaces, and enterprises with complex global payment needs. Its infrastructure processes billions of transactions annually with 99.99% uptime SLAs. The dedicated support team includes payment specialists who can help optimize acceptance rates and reduce costs.

Codat is a universal API platform that enables financial institutions, lenders, and fintech companies to access small business financial data from accounting software, banking, and commerce platforms. Founded in London in 2017 and backed by JPMorgan, American Express Ventures, and Index Ventures, Codat's mission is to make it easy for any business to access and analyze SMB financial data. Codat's pre-built integrations cover 50+ data sources including QuickBooks, Xero, FreeAgent, Sage, Plaid, Stripe, Shopify, and Square—normalizing the data from each into a consistent schema. Lend is Codat's lending automation suite, enabling lenders to pull accounting data, bank statements, and commerce data to automate underwriting decisions. Sync for Payables automates accounts payable workflows for businesses and financial institutions. Bill Pay enables suppliers and buyers to share invoice and payment data. Codat's synchronized data model keeps data fresh automatically, eliminating manual data collection. The platform is particularly popular with embedded lending, invoice financing, and trade credit use cases where real-time SMB financial data drives underwriting decisions. Codat's approach of normalizing heterogeneous SMB financial data reduces integration complexity from months to days. The company serves leading banks, fintechs, and business lenders including PayPal, Sage, and multiple UK challenger banks.

Finicity is an open banking platform acquired by Mastercard in 2020 for $825 million that provides financial data access, insights, and payment services to fintech companies, lenders, and financial institutions. Founded in 2000, Finicity has one of the longest track records in financial data connectivity, with coverage of 10,000+ financial institutions across North America. Finicity's core products include account aggregation (Connect), financial data APIs, and cash flow analysis for lending decisions. Its Verification of Assets, Verification of Income, and Cash Flow Analytics products are widely used in mortgage lending and consumer lending—Finicity data is accepted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for Day 1 Certainty in the mortgage process. The Mastercard acquisition has accelerated Finicity's open banking capabilities and expanded its European presence through the Mastercard Open Banking suite. Finicity's data quality and coverage of smaller financial institutions is a key differentiator for lenders needing comprehensive applicant financial pictures. The Mastercard connection provides enhanced fraud detection and identity verification capabilities. Finicity's API platform supports real-time permissioned data access with tokenized connections that consumers can revoke. Unlike Plaid, which targets developers and startups, Finicity has historically focused on enterprise lending and mortgage use cases where data accuracy and regulatory compliance are paramount.

Lithic (formerly Privacy.com for Business) is a card issuing platform that provides fintechs, startups, and enterprises with the infrastructure to launch Visa debit and credit card programs through a simple API. Founded in 2014, Lithic has built a developer-first card issuing platform known for its clean documentation, fast integration, and flexible spend controls. The platform enables businesses to issue single-use, merchant-locked, and category-locked virtual cards for expense control and vendor payments. Physical card programs support both instant-issue and personalized cards for consumer and commercial products. Lithic's spend controls are programmable in real time, enabling complex authorization logic for expense management platforms, BNPL products, and financial services applications. The platform's sandbox environment provides full production parity for testing. Lithic handles the BIN sponsorship, card network relationships, and regulatory compliance so clients can focus on product development rather than infrastructure. The company offers both white-label and co-branded card programs. Integration with popular BaaS platforms and accounting tools simplifies financial operations. Lithic has processed billions in card volume and serves dozens of fintech companies. Its developer-focused approach, with comprehensive API documentation and responsive support, makes it particularly popular with engineering-led companies building financial products.

Marqeta is the leading modern card issuing platform, powering the payment cards for companies like DoorDash, Instacart, Square Cash App, Uber, and Klarna. Founded in Oakland in 2010, Marqeta pioneered just-in-time (JIT) provisioning—the ability to fund cards in real time at the point of purchase with precise control logic. This innovation enabled entirely new payment experiences like gig worker instant pay, corporate virtual cards for specific vendors, and Buy Now Pay Later card-based products. Marqeta's open API platform allows clients to customize card behaviors with granular spending controls: transaction limits, merchant category restrictions, geographic limits, and real-time decisioning logic. The platform issues both physical and virtual cards on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover networks. Marqeta's tokenization capabilities support Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. Its sandbox environment with complete testing capabilities enables rapid product development. Marqeta went public in June 2021. The platform processes hundreds of billions in volume annually and issues cards in 40+ countries. Key use cases include expense management (virtual cards with spending rules), disbursements (instant payouts to workers), lending (BNPL card products), and digital banking (neobank debit cards). Its revenue sharing model means clients earn interchange revenue on their card programs.

MX Technologies is a financial data platform that helps banks, credit unions, and fintechs connect, enhance, and act on financial data to improve customer financial health. Founded in 2010, MX focuses on data quality and enrichment that competitors often overlook—its cleansing and categorization engine converts raw transaction data into actionable insights. MX Connect provides open banking connectivity to 16,000+ financial institutions for account aggregation. Unlike Plaid's developer focus, MX targets financial institutions directly, offering white-label financial wellness tools that banks can embed in their digital products. MX Data Enhancement cleans and enriches transaction data with merchant logos, categories, and contextual information. Pulse is MX's personal financial management suite for banks to offer spending insights, budgeting, and financial goals to customers. MX Access provides open banking APIs for businesses building financial data applications. The platform's financial strength scores help lenders make better credit decisions using cash flow analysis. MX Insights enables financial institutions to identify customer needs and personalize outreach based on spending patterns. MX's partnerships with major core banking providers (FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry) facilitate deep integration with bank infrastructure. The company raised $300 million at a $1.9 billion valuation in 2021. MX is particularly popular with credit unions and community banks wanting to compete with big bank digital experiences.

Nium is a global financial infrastructure platform that enables businesses and banks to embed real-time payment, card issuing, and banking capabilities into their products and services. Founded in Singapore in 2015, Nium has become one of Asia's most valuable fintech companies, processing billions in payments annually across 190+ countries. Nium's licensed infrastructure spans 35+ countries, providing direct access to local payment rails without the need for correspondent banking chains. The platform's Send capability enables real-time international payouts to bank accounts, mobile wallets, and cards. Receive functionality allows businesses to collect payments from customers worldwide in local currencies. Nium Transact is its multi-currency account with local virtual IBANs. Card issuing supports Visa and Mastercard programs in 40+ markets. Nium is particularly popular with B2B fintech companies, travel businesses, digital banks, and enterprises that need to embed financial services. Its API-first design enables rapid integration, while pre-built modules accelerate time-to-market. Nium's compliance infrastructure handles licensing, AML, and regulatory reporting across jurisdictions. The platform has notable clients in travel, workforce management, and financial services sectors. Nium went public on Nasdaq in 2023.

Payoneer is a cross-border payment platform that helps businesses, professionals, and freelancers receive payments globally and manage international finances. Founded in 2005 and now serving 5+ million customers in 190+ countries, Payoneer is particularly popular among e-commerce sellers, digital service providers, and businesses with international payment needs. The platform enables businesses to receive payments in multiple currencies through local bank accounts in the US, EU, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, and Mexico—appearing as local transfers to payers. Payoneer integrates with major marketplaces and platforms including Amazon, Upwork, Fiverr, Airbnb, Google, and Getty Images. Its multi-currency receiving accounts eliminate costly international wire transfers for many use cases. The Payoneer Prepaid Mastercard allows cardholders to spend their balance globally. Business payments between Payoneer accounts are free, making it ideal for paying contractors and suppliers internationally. Payoneer Capital provides working capital advances based on account history. The platform supports mass payouts to thousands of recipients simultaneously, popular with marketplace operators. Currency conversion uses competitive mid-market rates with transparent fees. Risk and compliance tools help businesses navigate international payment regulations. Payoneer went public via SPAC in 2021, and continues to expand its B2B payment capabilities.

PayPal Business is one of the world's most recognized online payment solutions, enabling merchants to accept payments from over 400 million active consumer accounts globally. With more than 25 years of operation, PayPal has built unparalleled brand recognition that increases consumer trust and checkout conversion rates. PayPal Business supports credit and debit card processing, PayPal Checkout, Pay Later options (Buy Now Pay Later), Venmo for Business, and PayPal Here for in-person payments. The platform handles 25+ currencies across 200+ markets, making it particularly strong for cross-border e-commerce. PayPal's Seller Protection program safeguards merchants against fraudulent claims and chargebacks. Braintree, acquired by PayPal, powers the developer API layer for more sophisticated integrations. PayPal Working Capital offers financing based on PayPal sales history. Advanced fraud protection tools include machine learning models trained on billions of transactions. The PayPal dashboard provides real-time transaction monitoring, reporting, and customer insights. Integrations are available with virtually every major e-commerce platform including Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. While PayPal fees are higher than competitors for pure card processing, the trusted brand and 'PayPal button' effect often justify the premium through improved conversion.