Alto Global Processing: Credorax Banks $40M for International Expansion

Consider Credorax Inc., which raised $40 million from FTV Capital to modernize how payments are made, taking its total funding to close to $100 million, as VentureWire reported today.

“The payments world is changing so fast, there are all kinds of services you need today that 10 years ago nobody would have thought of,” said founder and Chief Executive Benjamin Nachman, who started Credorax in 2008. He said he hopes to take the company public in about three years.

Credorax is known in the banking world as an acquiring bank, meaning that it processes credit and debit card payments for merchants. It competes with huge, global publicly traded banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., but uses modern technology and has superior ways of detecting fraud, according toDavid Blumberg, managing partner of Blumberg Capital, which is Credorax’s first investor.

Since it went to market in the third quarter of 2011, the company has been growing so fast that a wary Visa Inc. required millions of dollars in escrow before it would do business with Credorax, Mr. Blumberg said. Blumberg Capital provided the money, which Credorax didn’t have, in exchange for more equity, making Credorax its largest single investment. In the last 18 months, the value of those warrants has quadrupled, he said.

Mr. Blumberg compared Credorax to ITA Software Inc., which Google Inc. acquired in 2011 to process travel reservations, thereby disrupting competitors in the travel industry that relied on mainframe computers developed as early as the 1960s. Credorax, like ITA, uses commodity hardware to conduct massive parallel processing of transactions, which is fast, flexible, scalable and cheap.

So far, Credorax is licensed and regulated in nearly 30 countries, including all countries in the European Union. The goal is to get licensed in all major global markets. In international transactions where a merchant might require five or six acquiring banks—some of them running in different countries and using different technologies that require data to be reconciled at the end–Credorax can do it all, Mr. Nachman said.

To evaluate potential fraud, for instance, Credorax can analyze multiple pieces of data–time zone, Internet Protocol address, shopping history and so on–and notify Visa or Mastercard if warranted. If the transaction is not fraudulent but is in a riskier geography, the local merchant could have the confidence to close it anyway, raising sales.

“Fraud is huge internationally…Some merchants accept no credit cards from the Middle East. They’re cutting off everybody because they cut with an ax instead of a scalpel,” Mr. Blumberg said.

Mr. Blumberg called the company “modestly valued” in the latest round of financing and said the valuation was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, though he and other investors declined to be more specific.

Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage 

 Please visit The Wall Street Journal for more news!