Weavr Secures EMI Licence from the MFSA
Pioneering embedded finance provider Weavr has successfully obtained an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) Licence from the Maltese Financial Services Authority (MFSA) to support its European embedders.
Today, Weavr announces that it has acquired a European e-money licence. The licence is significant for both Weavr and the embedded finance industry as it aids the expanded adoption of embedded finance by B2B SaaS businesses.
The MFSA granted the licence after extensive review of Weavr’s operating model, which has been designed specifically to make embedded finance easier for software businesses to integrate into their applications and deliver a seamless customer experience, while delivering the highest standards of security for customers.
Embedded finance is a new distribution channel for financial services, which to date has largely been implemented through the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) operating model. Regulators across the world, including several in Europe, have raised questions about the ability of such financial institutions to conduct effective oversight over the multitude of fintechs and embedded financial products built on the BaaS model. Weavr’s approach has been designed differently, addressing these legitimate concerns of regulators from the ground up. The issuance of a licence following an extended period of scrutiny by the MFSA is a testament to Weavr’s ‘embeddable by design’ approach.
Weavr offers B2B SaaS companies a comprehensive, one-stop shop for implementing embedded finance services with high-quality infrastructure and minimal hassle. With its new licence, Weavr is set to develop the most comprehensive domiciled IBAN offering in Europe, supporting major European currencies and economies beyond the Eurozone. To these regions, Weavr will be able to bring a range of financial products that span cards, account and fund transfer networks globally. Several of these financial products will be powered by Visa, with whom the company entered into a strategic partnership one year ago.
These capabilities will all benefit from Weavr’s rich set of toolkits that allow the most demanding of online brands to seamlessly embed every aspect of the user experience, from on-boarding to strong customer authentication. Pan-European B2B SaaS businesses will be able to offer their customers comprehensive workflows where business data, process controls and execution of payment activities are fully joined up to deliver both a step-change improvement in productivity and also a reduction in the occurrence of expensive errors arising from the back-and-forth transfer of financial data between business applications and banking systems.
Speaking on securing the EMI licence, Alex Mifsud, co-founder & CEO of Weavr, said: “In this new era when regulators across Europe are increasingly addressing the risks associated with Banking as a Service, we are honoured to be among the first organisations awarded a financial licence specifically to operate a safer model for embedded finance.
“This licence is a seminal milestone in Weavr’s evolution. It enables us to deliver our ‘embeddable by design’ operating model, which we have refined over the past few years through our collaboration with several financial partners, in its purest and most powerful form. For B2B SaaS businesses, it represents unprecedented ease in adopting embedded finance to deliver transformative software experiences for a multitude of business critical jobs across accounting and billing, project management, HR management, and the like.”