Creandum backs Osu

Empowering the self-employed via seamless instant payments

When it comes to payments, changes in customer behaviour occur in waves once a new technology is introduced. In 2011, we backed iZettle to empower every offline merchant to accept card payments via POS. Over the years, card payments have been adopted rapidly, and iZettle enabled millions of merchants to run their business more smoothly. Today, we are very excited to announce another wave of payment disruption for microbusinesses, thanks to Osu.

We see that PSD2 with open banking technology is once again enabling businesses to improve the payment experience and handling. Open banking uses mobile banking authentication to facilitate an automatic money transfer.

The advantages are:

1. The cost of a bank transfer is absolutely nothing

2. The level of security is high due to the biometric authentication requirement

3. The payment is instant with no holding period

4. Open banking payments are 10x more convenient than entering an IBAN

So far, open banking technology has mainly been used for online, low-frequency and high-value transactions whereby the traditional 2–3% payment fees hurt the merchants the most. Physical, e-commerce and marketplace sales are still dominated by card transactions as they are fast, and keep store queues short while online sales conversion rates remain high. Higher merchant payment fees are motivated by tokenization and other checkout innovations.

However, if we look more closely at which transactions are still mostly cash-based or reliant on manual bank transfers, we discover the millions of micro-businesses across Europe. With Osu, we are proud to back the Swiss Army knife for sole traders. Noam, Alon & Daniel built the perfect mobile app solution for professionals such as personal trainers, roofers, taxi drivers, or osteopaths to manage their business and never worry about payment fees or chasing banking transfers ever again. Osu charges a SaaS fee, thereby giving the merchants back 100% of their revenue and much more. Instead of troublesome IBAN transfers or withdrawing cash for every session, with Osu the customers have a much better experience.

Osu works as follows:

1. A payment link or an invoice is shared in any digital channel (e.g. via message or email)

2. The customer opens the link and selects their bank

3. Their banking app opens automatically and asks for payment authentication

4. The payment is successful and an invoice is automatically generated and assigned to the payment

On the customer's side, there is no additional app needed, there is no additional account needed, and the process takes less than 15 seconds.

For merchants, Osu is not just facilitating the payment. The app uses the collected customer information to offer a neat CRM system and later also calendar features, bookkeeping, and taxation services. Merchants do not need to set up an Osu bank account. They can stay at their business account of choice and use Osu as a layer on top to run the business. We believe that microbusinesses - and sole traders in particular - do not need 15 different SaaS subscriptions to run their business. We believe they need Osu. At Creandum, we like to see companies that do not simply force merchants to use a radically different infrastructure, but rather facilitate more business, easier business, and faster business.

Today, we are excited to add Osu to the #CreandumFamily and lead their $3M seed round. Want to be part of the next payment revolution? Osu is hiring!

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