London-based Banked, which lets merchants accept payments without users creating an account or sharing data, raises $20M Series A led by BOA and Edenred
Banked is a FinTech startup that offers an alternative to card schemes. Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data …
Context & Ripple Effects
Banked's $20M Series A lands in the middle of a London-centered funding run for account-to-account checkout rivals: Vyne raised a $15.5M seed in late 2021 and Token.io followed months later with a $40M Series C, both building open banking payment rails for merchants. The lead investors matter here — Edenred runs large-scale corporate payment programs, so this is a strategic check from an incumbent payments player rather than purely financial capital.
First-order effects
- Merchants on Banked can accept payments without customers creating accounts or entering financial data, giving them a working alternative to card-scheme checkout at the moment of payment.
- BOA and Edenred convert capital into early access to account-to-account rails, positioning them inside the merchant flow rather than watching it from the card side.
Second-order effects
- Token.io, Vyne, and later Brite Payments — whose $60M Series A showed the category still attracting outsized rounds — now compete with Banked for the same merchant integrations, pushing pricing and integration friction down across the group.
- Card schemes face checkout-level substitution pressure in Europe as funded rivals bundle no-data, no-account payment flows directly against card entry forms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, checkout consolidates around bank-account rails funded at Series A-to-C scale, shifting fee economics away from interchange toward whoever owns the merchant-side routing layer.
- Incumbent payment companies like Edenred backing these startups signals a structural hedge: established players are buying optionality on the rails that would otherwise erode their card volumes.
The trend: European open banking payments startups are raising progressively larger rounds to route merchant checkout away from card schemes and onto direct bank-account rails.