By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 22nd, 2024
Many of the most discerning tech companies globally – including Chime, Robinhood, Monzo, Revolut, Transferwise, Varo and many others – trust Galileo’s APIs to open and verify new financial accounts, issue and process payment cards, and launch new products.
A gentleman named Clay Wilkes had already decided to retire and enjoy his late years when he changed his mind – he’d rather not to. In 2000 this amazing entrepreneur launched Galileo Financial Services and already then realized the growing demand for better integration between and financial institutions and secondary services.
19 years later, what his company does exactly that is the back-office connections with financial institutions and, boy, what kind of portfolio this guy has. Among his clients are some of the biggest names in financial technology and Wilkes just raised $77 million in financing from Accel Partners.
It is true though that Galileo actually didn’t need that money at all because, if you’d look at the company’s sheets, you’d see it has been recording profits year after year and together with companies such as Chime Banking, Robinhood, Monzo and TransferWise that are all in the above-mentioned portfolio – profit doesn’t seem that hard to reach. As a matter of fact, this debit and credit card service provider will have nearly $26 billion in financing by the end of the year.
Nowadays companies that are trying to find their path to the financial markets have a pretty rocky road in front of them. However, there are few ways how can one dig its way out. One of the ways is merging with some financial institutions that will take care of all the money businesses through the FDIC assured accounts. Another way is to do it all by yourself and that’s what most of the companies are looking to do. However, when that happens, the companies have to have a bank on whose system they can connect and that bank has to have relevant technologies that are able to suck everything up – from debit and credit cards charging to transaction processing.
Joining the Galileo board of directors is also Accel partner, John Locke who says Galileo is almost the second side of the same coin on which are companies as the Braintree or Stripe investments.
However, Galileo’s focus isn’t on only taking online orders and processing payments. The company also makes business with the users who decided to spend their money on the new services and they are therefore ready to change their views and pass on the traditional banks to their upstart challengers.
Wilkes explains:
“Through the API what they’re doing is creating and managing accounts, authorizing merchant transactions, monitoring fraud, initiating disputes and chargebacks, being able to configure products and a wide variety of product. We support direct deposit accounts and we do credit products… all of these capabilities are capabilities that fit on our platform.”
However, as the real gentleman, Wilkes doesn’t kiss and tell so it’s almost impossible to find out from him anything regarding the company’s valuation except that it’s worth “a substantial amount” (as if we didn’t know that already).
Still, Wilkes will thoroughly explain ways of how Galileo is using raised money among which is expanding its geographical reach beyond North America.
As he said:
“It’s actively pursuing opportunities in Brazil and Colombia and Argentina.”
At the same time the company already has kind of a monopoly on the UK market. “The top five largest fintechs in the U.K. are all clients today,” explained he.
Gaileo doesn’t take a fixed percentage on transactions but only a few cents per processed transaction.
“We’re in a golden era of fintech innovation and Galileo has quietly built the API infrastructure layer powering the industry’s most innovative products. Clay and his team have built a very impressive business with many parallels to companies like Qualtrics and Atlassian: bootstrapping first to build a quiet, profitable powerhouse and now, ready to go big globally. We’re excited to help Clay and team take Galileo to the next level,” noted Locke.