GrailPay Raises $6.7 Million to Expand Risk Layer for Bank Payments

GrailPay has raised $6.7 million to expand its risk and data platform for bank payments that is used to make ACH payments safer, smarter and faster.

The company will use the new funding to grow its product and engineering teams, expand its go-to-market efforts and add new capabilities to the platform, according to a Wednesday (June 11) press release.

It aims to bring to bank payments the sort of fraud tooling, risk engines and analytics that have been developed for credit cards over the past decades, GrailPay CEO and Co-founder Will Messina said in the release.

“We’re building the modern intelligence layer to unlock the next growth wave of payments tied to a bank account,” Messina said.

GrailPay’s tools are used by more than 10,000 businesses, including payment platforms, lenders, FinTechs and software vendors, according to the release.

These businesses use the tools to gain predictive analytics and real-time signals across account enrollment, transaction monitoring and merchant underwriting that help them reduce failed payments, accelerate decisioning and automate operation, per the release.

Camila Saruhashi, investor at Construct Capital, which led the funding round, said in the release: “GrailPay is building what every modern payments company needs: a flexible, intelligent risk layer purpose-built for bank payments. The traction they’ve already seen speaks to how overdue this is.”

Pay by bank is gaining traction in consumer-facing sectors, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Trustly collaboration, “Cost Concerns Hinder Merchants’ Pay by Bank Adoption — But Current Payments Could Cost More.”

The report found among the companies that are not currently offering pay by bank, 91% are very or extremely interested in adopting it.

Consumer-facing companies that have already adopted pay by bank reported that its benefits include lower cart abandonment rates, enhanced data security for their customers, and ease of use for consumers.

Messina wrote in an April blog post that before building its trust layer for bank payments, GrailPay built a bank payment processing platform primarily focused on ACH. That enabled the company to amass a data asset to understand bank payments.

“With well over $100B in returns in bank payments every year in the United States and faster payments growing by over 40% a year, there is no better time to solve this problem and bring trust to bank payments,” Messina wrote.