NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, February 19, 2015

London-based online money transfer business WorldRemit has closed a funding round worth $100m, backed by Technology Crossover Ventures and prior investor Accel Partners.

Founded in 2010 by former United Nations compliance advisor Ismail Ahmed, the business now has a base in the US and plans to hire 200 new staff.

The financial technology sector has seen a number of new companies enter in the hope of further disrupting a sector that had long been dominated by banks and other dated organisations.

On the back of closing his latest fundraising deal, Ahmed took some of our questions and mapped out where he would like to take his business.

What have the biggest developments in the business been during the last year?

Apart from our two funding rounds, which total $140m, we have done some amazing partnership deals with telcos to enable transfers to Mobile Money services arounds the world. The biggest was an agreement with MTN which enables our customers to send to all 16 of their Mobile Money services. We also opened our US headquarters in Denver at the end of 2014 and have been building up our team there.

How did this fundraising differ from previous ones?

It was bigger, obviously. TCV looked very closely at our business, and the broader remittance market. The knowledge they brought to our discussions was phenomenal. However, it was the same basic things that drove this investment – an acknowledgement of WorldRemit’s growth to date and a recognition of the vast opportunity that lies before us. Right now around 5 per cent of the $550bn remittance market is online – we expect the majority of that to shift to digital in coming years.