We are thrilled to be making a £2m investment in The Currency Cloud. Notion wants to invest in Europe’s best and most high potential start-ups in the B2B Cloud Computing space and we think this investment is a great example of this.

The Currency Cloud provides a web-based currency conversion and international payments service for businesses. There are more than $200bn cross-border payments made everyday and it’s a market that is dominated by the banks. The problem is that the banks make the process pretty complicated and charge around 4% in fees to all but their largest customers. In researching this market, we have rarely seen so much pain and frustration from customers and such a strong desire for an alternative.

This is where The Currency Cloud comes in - their service is easy to use, has a transparent fee of around 0.5% and you can manage and track the process from end to end. The company is already doing multiple millions in transactions everyday and growing very quickly. Additionally, the team has great experience of both the FX market and also of taking start-ups through to big exits. So we are very excited about this investment – they are a company that belongs in London as the centre of the FX world and, at the same time, can expand on a global scale.

More broadly, The Currency Cloud are part of a new generation of ‘Finance 2.0’ companies that are taking specific markets where banks have traditionally dominated and using the internet to innovate and offer a real alternative. The internet enables the democratization of services that were previously only available to the big guys and leaves large companies with nowhere to hide anymore. Traditional banks will be forced to provide better and more transparent services or risk losing their dominance across numerous markets. All this has to be good for the consumer, the smaller business and The Currency Cloud.

In other news, Notion invests $9m into the rocket driving the Direct Booking Movement.