Link, which lets merchants in the US accept direct bank payments, raised a $10M seed led by Tiger Global and a $20M Series A led by Valar
People are addicted to credit cards — and it's no wonder, given the lucrative rewards that many of them offer. But for merchants, credit cards tend to be less appealing. Tweets: @cpa_trendlines Tweets: Rick Telberg / @cpa_trendlines : Link raises $30M to help merchants accept direct bank payments: People are addicted to credit cards — and it's no wonder, given the lucrative rewards that many of them offer. But for merchants, credit cards... https://techcrunch.com/... > https://confirmsubscription.com/ ... #fintech #PE #VC https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pay-by-bank has been building quietly on the other side of the Atlantic: London-based Banked raised a $20M Series A last year to let merchants accept account-to-account payments without users creating an account or sharing data. Link is the same thesis landing in the US market, where card interchange and rewards economics make merchants the motivated party.
The investor overlap is telling. Valar led Link's Series A after previously backing Petal, which underwrites credit cards from cash flow rather than scores twice — so the same firm is funding both sides of the card-versus-bank-rail question. Tiger Global's seed lead continues its pattern of concentrated bets across fintech and consumer infrastructure.
First-order effects
- US merchants gain a domestic direct-bank-payment option at the point of sale, letting them route transactions around card interchange fees that fund the consumer rewards the article describes.
- Banked's model no longer owns the category narrative: a US-funded competitor with $30M means pay-by-bank becomes a two-market race rather than a European experiment.
Second-order effects
- Card-issuing fintechs in the related coverage — Petal on underwriting, Cardless on co-branded programs — face a merchant-side counterweight: if bank payments take share, the rewards budgets that make cards sticky come under margin pressure from the merchants paying for them.
- Identity and verification infrastructure becomes the bottleneck for account-to-account payments without data sharing, pulling demand toward providers like SentiLink whose APIs financial institutions already use.
Third-order effects
- If merchant-funded rewards economics keep inflating while bank rails mature, payment volume structurally migrates toward account-to-account networks — shifting value capture from card networks and issuing banks to whoever owns the merchant checkout relationship.
- Capital concentration compounds the shift: mega-funds like Tiger Global picking winners early means pay-by-bank competition consolidates around a handful of heavily capitalized players rather than a long tail of startups.
The trend: Account-to-account payments are crossing from Europe into the US merchant mainstream, with venture capital betting that interchange-weary merchants will force a re-plumbing of consumer checkout.