Integrating with a payments API is something most — if not all — business-to-consumer platforms are forced to do at some point. It is practically unavoidable if they wish to receive credit card payments. The problem is that for platforms that deal with bills and invoicing, not just one-time charges, few payment APIs have all the necessary features to serve their workflows.
That’s why Ralph Rogge founded Cresco.
“Having worked with thousands of small businesses, it was clearly bill payments remained a hassle, especially compared to the frictionless checkout of consumer card payments,” said Rogge. (Previously, Rogge worked at YouLend, a startup that offers a range of financing solutions aimed at merchants and small business owners.) “Businesses should be building and selling products, not spending time and money setting up bill and invoice payments. Crezco makes these payments easy.”
So, does Crezco really make payments easy? From the sounds of it, yes.
Crezco creates workflows for collecting bill payments — specifically, bill-to-bill collection workflows. With them, payments, including overseas payments, are made directly from one account to another without the involvement of transaction intermediaries such as card networks.
With Crezco, businesses get automatic invoice reconciliation integrated with their existing accounting software and tools that allow them to create payment links, collect recurring payments and split payments between multiple accounts. Crezco also offers a built-in fraud detection system, as well as “instant” payment alerts via web and mobile.
“It’s not about replacing card payment with something cheaper, it’s about replacing manual bank transfers with something more convenient,” Rogge said. “Account-to-account and real-time payments are the future. They will be adopted more and more from country to country. It is Crezco’s job to connect these international payment rails into a single API for our partners and their customers. The ultimate goal is to make it easier for businesses to send and receive payments, domestically and internationally, saving time and money.”
Image Credits: Cresco
Crezco does not exist in a vacuum. Some of its most formidable competitors include Intuit and Wise, as well as Brite Payments, TrueLayer, Plaid, Melio and Tink (which Visa recently bought for $2 billion).
Rogge sees Crezco’s fraud prevention technology as a differentiator, among other capabilities.
“In addition to using account-to-account to process payments, Crezco leverages open banking to strengthen fraud systems by analyzing historical banking transactions,” said Rogge. “Most tools use the same few data points, which are checked against public datasets such as government sanctions lists. Open banking provides 10 years for every historical credit and debit transaction.”
Crezco claims to have more than 10,000 active customers — and hopes to dramatically increase that number through a partnership with Xero, the UK accounting technology company. Crezco will replace Wise, with whom Xero previously had an agreement for integrated bill payment solutions.
Investors seem pleased with Crezco’s performance. Today, the company announced that MMC Ventures and 13books have invested $12 million in their Series A round, bringing Crezco’s total raised to $18 million. Rogge says the proceeds will go toward expanding Crezco’s account-to-account product and expanding its team size from 25 to 45.
“The structural headwinds in business-to-business payments are significant,” Rogge said, “including the forced adoption of e-invoicing, the growing use of accounting software and business-to-business platforms globally, the growing adoption of bill-to-pay accounts and open banking and ever-increasing cross-border payments’.
