Modulr Expands Into Edinburgh FinTech Scene to Fuel Business Growth

The new digital payments account for business, Modulr is set to create over 30 new jobs in Scotland before the end of the year

High-growth UK payments fintech, Modulr, has opened a new office in Edinburgh to take advantage of the city’s burgeoning fintech scene and grow its software engineering, customer support, risk and compliance, and finance teams.

Modulr recently completed its latest funding round, led by the UK’s leading digital venture builder, Blenheim Chalcot which brought the total investment in the company to £10.5m since its formation in January 2016. The investment in Edinburgh is enabling key additional capacity and capability to support Modulr’s significant growth.

Modulr accounts provide an alternative to bank accounts for business payments, making them faster, easier and more reliable than legacy technology solutions.[i]The Edinburgh team will be working to extend the current offering to existing and new customers in alternative lending, payments fintech, payroll services, finance software providers and marketplaces, as well as into new markets. Modulr’s digital payments account, which automates and manages payments in real time, 24/7, will also be enhanced with new features that will open-up additional integrated ways for customers to get paid, reconcile and make payments instantly; with more functionality to be announced on this over the coming months.

Having undertaken a review of the various technology hubs across Europe, Modulr chose Edinburgh for its excellent talent pool, support from industry and government bodies such as FinTech Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, and for being the UK’s 2^nd largest financial services centre. Scotland has seen the number of people employed in the financial and related professional services industry grow by 6.6% from 151,000 to 161,000 in the last year.[ii]  A recent review of global fintech hubs by Deloitte highlighted the city for its thriving fintech ecosystem.

Modulr identified that to meet its growth and product development targets, it would need to at least double its technology team in 2018 and further in future years. Edinburgh is the ideal home: its developer population grew by 8% in the second half of 2017, reaching nearly 20,000. Modulr will look to recruit directly from this talent pool, as well as from the city’s three renowned academic institutions: The University of Edinburgh (including the world-leading School of Informatics), Edinburgh Napier University and Heriot-Watt University. The University of Edinburgh was one of 14 UK universities to be named a Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research in June 2017, which complements Edinburgh Napier University’s Cyber Academy.

Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr, commented: “As a technology business, building high quality and scalable software engineering, risk and compliance, customer support and finance teams is critical to our current and future growth. Following our strong initial success, we identified the need to scale and we set about looking for a location with a strong talent pool and pipeline.”

Rob Devey – Chair, Modulr& Advisory Partner, Blenheim Chalcot, commented: “Modulr solves a real pain point – replacing outdated, slow and unreliable manual payment processes with an efficient and manageable payments platform. This is an important step on their growth journey and evidence of the growing demand for their solutions. Blenheim Chalcot is delighted to be supporting Modulr as the team expands to Edinburgh.”

Stephen Ingledew, CEO of FinTech Scotland, commented: “Edinburgh is a burgeoning hub for talented software developers. Combine this with the city’s unmatched financial services heritage, and we have a recipe for success for ambitious fintech leaders like Modulr.”

In its first two years, Modulr has processed £4.2bn in business payments, while transaction volumes have been growing by an average of 11% month-on-month. With the opportunities presented by its new office in Edinburgh, Modulr expects to double the size of its team over the last six months of the year; reaching over 100 employees across both its Edinburgh and London offices.

 [i]Faster, easier and more reliable than legacy technology solutions such as file-based systems traditionally used for business and corporate payment solutions.

[ii]Scottish Financial Enterprise and TheCityUK (link here).