NoFrixion ready to scale up after fintech gains ‘triple crown’ of authorisations

NoFrixion, the fintech company that is developing an embedded money transfer platform, is set to scale up in 2024 after reaching important milestones in recent months.

Last year, NoFrixion was the first Irish fintech to gain both the Electric Money Institution (EMI) authorisation and the Virtual Asset Service Provider (Vasp) registration.

On top of that, NoFrixion also received the B-Corp certification in November, which verifies the social and environmental aspirations of a company.

Feargal Brady, co-founder and chief executive, said the authorisations feel like NoFrixion gained the “triple crown”.

“2023 has been a fantastic year for us, and we are ready to transition into the upscaling stage and gain more commercial traction,” Brady said.

“Ireland has a very high regulatory standard, it’s like the gold standard in regulations in Europe, so receiving these authorisations is good for our reputation at international businesses.”

NoFrixion’s platform MoneyMoov was designed for companies to effectively manage funds from payments or on bank accounts on one single platform.

“This process would normally require a lot of manual organising, done by a whole dedicated team in a company,” Brady said. “We wanted to bring them all together.”

According to the company, MoneyMoov allows client companies to embed open banking, automate expense handling and management and use intelligent funds allocation.

“We are one of very few platforms that can run multiple currencies and also Bitcoin,” Brady said.

The targeted customer group for NoFrixion stretches across various sectors and business sizes, Brady said.

“We can work with medium and small enterprises as well as big global corporations,” he said. “After receiving our licences, we started to get more inquiries from bigger companies.”

NoFrixion is particularly useful for companies that provide services such as apps or platforms themselves, as they receive funds from a large amount of customers at once.

As of now, the company has close to 100 customer companies, with some of them already reaching out from other EU countries.

“We offer the platform in three variations, depending on how much it is supposed to be integrated into the company’s infrastructure,” Brady said.

The company offers options, from a no-code version up to to a fully integrated option, that the customer can individualise to their needs.

“We plan to improve the developer experience, so that customers who choose the fully integrated option can implement it in the most comfortable way,” Brady said.

“This is what really differentiates us from other banking platforms, because most of them rely on technology that might already be a decade old,” Brady said.

The foundation of NoFrixion’s technological edge was mostly contributed by Brady’s co-founder, Aaron Clauson, who is the company’s chief technical officer.

Clauson had already worked for over 20 years as a systems developer for a number of corporations, including Intel, and Blueface, which he and Brady founded together.

“We founded Blueface in 2005 and later sold it to Comcast [in 2020],” Brady said.

The idea to focus on embedded banking for a new start-up was informed by their experiences with Blueface.

“We were frustrated with the banking services and the amount of labour and time we had to invest in all of it,” Brady said. “We then formed the idea of a programmable banking account.”

After Blueface, Brady also co-founded a number of other businesses.

Akara robotics was both co-founded and chaired by him, as was Venture Wave Capital, which he co-founded in 2008 and where he still works as a general partner.

In 2021, Clauson and Brady launched NoFrixion.

“Between us lay 25 years of founding and developing experience,” Brady said. “We self-funded the first period but quickly some investors who were already involved in Blueface joined.”

One of those was Enterprise Ireland, who contributed to NoFrixion through the High-Potential-Start-Up fund.

Since then, the company has grown to 20 staff and during its biggest investment round, NoFrixion managed to raise €3.6 million in 2022.