Joe Redmond. Image: Navro
Founded in 2022, Navro wants to help businesses break into foreign markets by simplifying global transactions.
In today’s world, cashless transactions are becoming increasingly popular. Nowadays, it would be hard to find a shop or service that doesn’t have a digital payment option, while apps like Venmo and Revolut have gained immense popularity for day-to-day payments.
With the world of payments becoming ever digitised, a number of fintechs are leading the charge in developing innovative solutions, making the most of the opportunities that modern tech can provide.
One of these fintechs is Navro, a UK-based global payments start-up that has chosen Dublin as its European headquarters.
Navro – formerly known as Paytrix – aims to help international businesses navigate their growth into foreign markets by simplifying their global transactions through its payments curation platform.
“Typically, only the world’s biggest businesses with annual payment volumes in excess of $1bn have access to optimally efficient payment solutions,” says Navro’s Ireland and Europe CEO, Joe Redmond.
“We’re bringing that same functionality to international businesses with much lower payment volumes, along with other benefits, such as maximising the customer experience during online checkouts and improving the speed and accuracy of payments reconciliation.
In particular, Redmond says that Navro caters to businesses with multiple layers of incoming and outgoing payments across multiple jurisdictions, in sectors such as online marketplaces, employer-of-record platforms and pension providers.
“Our mission is to help Irish and European businesses scale internationally by removing the payments-related costs and complexities associated with overseas trade and market expansion.”
Financial hurdles
As Redmond says, the process of global payments can be a pain for businesses, especially smaller ones.
“Moving money across borders is complex and highly regulated. In addition, businesses are faced with labyrinths of fees and long delays, which can lock up working capital,” he explains.
“Those firms looking to process international payouts and collections either have to build an expensive, internal payments team or work with a network of dozens of suppliers across regions – all with their own contracts, gateways and support teams.”
When Navro’s founders, Aran Brown and Eddie Harrison, approached Redmond with a solution to these issues, he was “immediately taken by their vision” and was delighted to accept their offer of a position as CEO of Navro Ireland.
“Our approach has been to bring the best people together – people who have a deep understanding and experience of international payments – to build a compelling new payments proposition with gold-standard compliance fully incorporated from the outset.”
Through Navro’s platform, clients can collect funds locally in more than 35 currencies and hold, convert and pay out funds globally via an API integration and a single contract. The start-up’s payout services allow customers to make payments in more than 170 countries and in more than 130 currencies.
Before joining Navro, Redmond accumulated three decades of experience in foreign exchange and payments, including holding executive, chair and board director roles at both Bank of Ireland Group and Fexco.
“Between us, Eddie, Aran and I have been working in payments for more than 60 years across all activities in the payments industry value chain, from card issuing to card acquiring, open banking to foreign exchange, cross border payments and everything in between.”
The pay off
According to Redmond, Navro has to exercise a higher level of caution than a typical start-up.
“‘Move fast and break things’ has typically been the modus operandi for many tech start-ups,” he says. “But there is no room for mistakes in a highly regulated sector like payments.”
He says that when the start-up first set out to build a payments curation solution, it avoided the “temptation of partnering with other fintechs”.
“This option could have accelerated our market entry ambitions but would impose limitations further down the line. We therefore took the more demanding but strategically sound route of building the Navro platform ourselves from scratch.”
And despite going down a route that proved “more intricate and time-consuming” than anticipated, Redmond believes going solo has been a key factor in the start-up’s traction in the market.
The start-up has already had plenty of success including raising $40m, securing key licences from a number of regulatory authorities, and getting nominated for PayTech Start-up of the Year at this year’s Fintech Futures PayTech Awards.
In regard to funding, Redmond says that two major funding rounds – one in March 2023 totalling $18.3m and an internal investment funding round in February of this year – have ensured the start-up “well capitalised for growth” as it focuses on international expansion. In particular, the start-up is looking at breaking into the US and Canadian markets.
“Of course, as a start-up, we are always striving to reach the next milestone, but we’re very pleased with the progress we are making.”
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