Global payment solutions provider Checkout.com has announced it is taking funding from outside investors for the first time in its history, having raised USD 230m in what was Europe’s largest fintech Series A round ever and globally the third largest fintech Series A round of all time.

Checkout.com plans to use the funding to “continue its rapid growth in Europe, the US and the Middle East, with further expansion into Asia and Latin America”.

The London-based company already cooperates with many of the UK and EU’s leading fintechs, providing comprehensive cross-border payment solution for digital commerce.

The business offers a unified integrated platform that features all main payment methods such as credit and debit cards, online banking, PayPal, Apple Pay, etc.


Another digital payment company, Germany’s Wirecard, has agreed an EUR 900m investment from a Japanese technology conglomerate, SoftBank.

Financial Times reports that Wirecard will issue bonds at a price of EUR 130 a share for SoftBank. The bonds will convert into a 5.6% stake in the German company.

“Partnership with SoftBank will help us to expand further into Asian markets, including Japan and South Korea, and see the companies collaborate on data analytics and artificial intelligence,” Wirecard said in a statement.

SoftBank said it intended to “deploy Wirecard’s digital payments technology at scale across new markets and sectors within SoftBank’s global technology portfolio”.

Financial Times notes that the investment proposal was announced just a day before Wirecard was due to present its annual results, which had been postponed due to the accounting issues in Asia. The problems at Wirecard started in January 2019, when the Financial Times first reported that one of the company’s senior executives in 2018 was “suspected of using forged and backdated contracts in suspicious transactions”.

The partner of Fintech section is