IPID announced Thursday it has secured $16 million in Series A funding led by Foundation Capital, with strategic investments from Citi and HSBC—a vote of confidence from two global banking giants that also happen to be customers.
The Singapore-based startup has built what amounts to a global telephone directory for bank accounts, verifying payee identities before money changes hands. It's a service that regulators, particularly across Europe and the UK, increasingly require as instant payments become the norm rather than the exception. The company has now raised $25.6 million in total funding and plans to push into the U.S. market while expanding its infrastructure to handle everything from traditional payment rails to stablecoins.
The timing reflects a broader shift in how money moves. Instant payment systems eliminate the float time that once gave banks a window to catch errors or fraud. When transfers happen in seconds, there's no room to recall a mistaken payment to "John Smith" at account number 12345 if the real John Smith never opened that account.
Building Infrastructure for a Faster Payments World
IPID's core offering is straightforward in concept, complex in execution: a single API connection that reaches more than 6,500 financial institutions, covering what the company estimates is roughly 85 percent of the world's banked population across 50-plus countries and some 4 billion accounts. The platform performs name-to-account matching and generates trust scores, essentially asking whether the name on a payment instruction matches the name on the destination account.
A newer product layer the company calls "Payment Agent" adds conversational interfaces for payment capture with built-in verification. Whether that feature gains traction remains to be seen—conversational AI in financial services has been promised before.
The three founders—Damien Dugauquier, Geertjan van Bochove, and Alain Raes—all came from SWIFT, the Brussels-based cooperative that runs the global interbank messaging network. Dugauquier, now CEO, led SWIFT's securities and compliance practice. Van Bochove serves as CFO and COO; Raes holds the title of founding partner and chief commercial officer. They launched IPID in 2021, a period when pandemic-accelerated digitalization made payment fraud both easier to execute and harder to detect.
The Series A brought in QED Investors, Monk's Hill Ventures, and Quona Capital alongside the lead and strategic investors. IPID's funding history traces a fairly conventional path: $3.3 million in seed funding led by Resolution Ventures and 1982 Ventures in August 2022, then a $5.3 million pre-Series A from Monk's Hill in mid-2024.
When Your Customers Become Your Investors
The involvement of Citi and HSBC as both investors and partners signals something beyond typical venture validation. Citi disclosed a collaboration with IPID last November to enhance Citi Verify, its payment validation service—an acknowledgment that building this infrastructure in-house would likely take longer and cost more than partnering.
"In an increasingly digital and interconnected financial landscape, it is critical to have payment validation that is instantaneous and highly secure," a Citi representative said in the company's announcement. "Our strategic alignment with IPID is further deepened through our participation in their Series A raise."
HSBC framed its investment as extending beneficiary validation beyond what local payment schemes require. "This can help improve efficiency and certainty in an increasingly dynamic payments ecosystem," the bank said, deploying the sort of carefully calibrated language global banks use when discussing anything that might touch compliance or fraud prevention.
Days after the funding announcement, Deutsche Bank said it would deploy IPID's "payment decision intelligence" across its global payments business. Three major banks signing on in quick succession suggests either remarkably good timing or a well-orchestrated rollout.
Riding Regulatory Tailwinds
IPID's growth mirrors regulatory changes that have made payee verification less optional. The European Union's Instant Payments Regulation, which entered into force in April 2024, mandates that payment service providers offer both instant euro payments and what's formally called Verification of Payee services. Compliance deadlines began rolling out in January 2025, with additional obligations extending through 2027.
The UK implemented similar requirements earlier through its Confirmation of Payee system, which the Payment Systems Regulator expanded in stages through October 2024 to include smaller payment service providers beyond the initial group of major banks.
The business case for these systems extends beyond regulatory compliance. LSEG Risk Intelligence has projected that global losses from authorized push payment fraud—where victims are tricked into authorizing transfers to criminals—could reach $331 billion by 2027. That figure, whether precisely accurate or not, has focused attention across the industry.
Distribution Through Partners and Aggregators
IPID has pursued a multi-channel distribution strategy. Experian announced last year it would bring IPID's global bank account verification to UK businesses, expanding coverage across SEPA and major international markets. Rahul Rege, head of fraud and identity at Experian UK&I, pointed to inconsistent verification standards across different markets as the problem the partnership aims to address.
Tazapay, a cross-border payments provider serving over 1,000 enterprises, integrated IPID as its payee verification layer in 2024, covering both traditional fiat and stablecoin transactions. Other customers include Nium, Hana Bank, and Triple-A. IPID holds certification as a Confirmation of Payee Aggregator through Pay.UK, the operator of the UK's retail payment systems.
The competitive landscape includes SurePay, which operates Confirmation of Payee and Verification of Payee networks across the EU and UK and was acquired by FIS in 2024. LSEG offers Global Account Verification services. Pay.UK manages the UK scheme governance. What distinguishes IPID, according to Foundation Capital partner Zach Noorani, is that it developed outside the traditional bank consortium model.
"It's quite a feat for something like this to develop outside of a bank consortium and makes IPID uniquely well-positioned to help financial institutions and payors globally fight fraud and streamline payment operations," Noorani said. Whether that independence proves an advantage long-term depends partly on whether banks continue to partner or eventually decide to build competing infrastructure collectively.
IPID operates from Singapore with offices spanning London, New York, Dubai, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Kuala Lumpur, and Mumbai—a geographic spread that reflects both regulatory fragmentation in payments and the need for local presence when selling to banks.
"Every payment starts with a decision, but institutions are often making that decision with incomplete information," Dugauquier said. "We started by solving bank account verification globally. We are now building the broader decision intelligence that institutions need before funds move—across countries, payment rails and forms of value."
That vision of payment decision intelligence represents the pitch for why a company focused on verification today might be worth significantly more tomorrow. Whether enterprises need another decision layer before money moves, or whether verification alone proves sufficient, will likely determine how far IPID's ambitions can extend beyond its current regulatory-driven growth.
