PPRO announces 85% volume growth despite pandemic, accelerates plans with new investment from Sprints and Citi

PPRO, the world’s leading local payments platform-as-a-service, reports today an 85% increase in transaction volume from last year, highlighting the exponential opportunities for cross-border e-commerce amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Due in part to a massive digital shift in e-commerce consumer behaviour, PPRO is now processing an annual run rate of USD 9bn in payment transaction volume.

Following their ongoing success, the company announces today the closing of a USD 50 million financing round led by Sprints Capital with participation from existing investors Citi Ventures and HPE Growth. Financial Technology Partners acted as exclusive financial advisor and Noerr as legal advisor to PPRO in this transaction. PPRO will use the funds to scale the organisation and accelerate strategic growth plans for its global platform.

PPRO has already grown the size of its team by 25% since the beginning of the year. The majority of these new hires are positioned to strengthen PPRO’s three product development centres in Germany, Singapore and Brazil; teams which are focused on delivering high-quality integrations to popular payment methods in key e-commerce markets across Europe, APAC and the Americas.

PPRO partners with payment service providers (PSPs) around the world to serve millions of merchants, dramatically expanding their cross-border market opportunity. Through one contract and one API, PSPs and merchants can simply plug into PPRO’s powerful platform and switch on the ability to accept local payment methods in over 175 e-commerce markets.

“We enable our partners to globalise their payments offering at a faster speed and with a level of quality that wouldn’t be feasible to achieve in-house. Despite any challenges created by the pandemic, we’ve made great progress this year on our mission to turbocharge growth for our partners and their merchants. We’ve been able to make their expansion into new markets more lucrative,”

comments Simon Black, CEO of PPRO.

“Now more than ever, companies are pressed to offer localised experiences to consumers worldwide. We are delighted that Sprints Capital and Citi Ventures see the growth potential of our business and are passionate about helping build the payments infrastructure that drives growth in global markets,” adds Black.

“We are excited about the opportunity our investment in PPRO brings. E-commerce is a complicated, dynamic growth area, and even the most sophisticated PSPs and merchants need companies like PPRO to help them overcome complexities on the infrastructure and enablement level. The momentum that PPRO has been building the last few years is most impressive,” says Voria Fattahi, Partner at Sprints Capital.

“We have invested in PPRO for the second time because we believe in the company’s strategy, and we’ve seen their power to deliver. With their local payment methods, PPRO fuels our consumer payments offering for institutional clients, Spring by Citi. Our partnership will help to empower Spring by Citi clients to deliver a seamless payments experience for their customers,” adds Luis Valdich, Managing Director, Citi Ventures.

Further PPRO highlights for 2020 include:

• New top LPMs integrated, including Grabpay, UnionPay, Konbini, Pay-easy, Paysafecash and more
• The PPRO 2020 Payment Almanac launched; the third edition of the most comprehensive source of payments insights in the industry
• New offices in Singapore, London and Munich to accommodate expanding staff