FinTech group SPG has raised £25 million after more than trebling revenues in the last year.
The London-headquartered group, founded in 2016, owns and operates the Shieldpay and Paycast platforms.
It aims to help people who don’t know one another to transact securely and with trust by modernising and simplifying the traditional escrow payment process.
The Series A round includes strategic funding from Mastercard and Marqeta. Other significant Investors in SPG include Elliott Management, CreditEase and Techstars.
Shieldpay, which gained immediate traction in the professional and financial services sectors, automates transactions, replacing paper-based and risky payment processes to ease regulatory reporting.
The business works with a range of clients, from top 100 law firms and sole practitioners to lenders and technology companies. Their legal clients utilise the platform for a wide variety of payment use cases including class action lawsuits, M&A and real estate.
“Last year we saw particular demand from the legal sector as firms embraced new technologies and ways of working,” Peter Janes, founder and CEO of SPG, said.
“Lawyers no longer want or have the time to take on the administrative and regulatory burden of processing payments internally and running client accounts. Our Series A funding will enable the business to capitalise on this demand and scale substantially.”
The group’s latest business, Paycast, is a payment engine for marketplaces and eCommerce. It specialises in facilitating and protecting high-value and time-sensitive transactions, enabling customers to hold funds in escrow between buyers and sellers until the conditions of a sale have been verified.
Paycast says its strategic partnership with Mastercard will create a valuable ecosystem for marketplaces, buyers and sellers in pursuit of a bold ambition to facilitate a new era of trust online.
“We are thrilled to be supporting Paycast on the next step of their journey, having worked closely with them since their early days in the Mastercard Start Path programme,” said Scott Abrahams, senior vice President, business development & FinTech, Mastercard UK & Ireland.
“From our technology and data assets to our global ecosystem of partners and dedicated programs, we are leveraging our tools and expertise to iterate with Paycast at every stage, transforming bold ideas together.”
To date SPG has processed over $3 billion dollars of payments for its clients and experienced a surge in business during the pandemic that saw revenues grow by over 360% in the last year.