Latvian Swipe launches to be easier than PayPal and faster than banks

Swipe already has its first customers, and was originally built as a payment workaround for the founders’ previous startup.

Swipe is an online payment solution that is as easy as swiping your card. It transfers the money directly to your account and has a built-in convenient invoicing and recurring payment system. As a business, Swipe lets any merchant accept Visa, Mastercard and BankLink payments, even without a webpage. As a customer, you sign up, set up Swipe once and the service handles all the payments for you.

Swipe was the finalist of Rietumu fintech challenge, selected among 16 startups from 7 countries. The team was mentored mobile expert and investor Roy Vella, angel investor and serial entrepreneur Viesturs Sosars and VP of Rietumu bank Jevgenijs Dugajevs.

“We have tested Swipe in closed beta with 5 different size companies,” Swipe founder Jevgenijs Novickis revealed to us after Rietumu Fintech challenge. “All of them have signed up to be our clients after we launch the product. A big telecom company sees it as a way to cut the number of people involved in processing payments from 3 to 1, while smaller businesses see the value of faster turnaround of their working capital.”

Fast-forward to today: the Swipe has just been launched here, signing up merchants in English, Russian and Latvian. Moreover, they have closed a strategic partnership with Rietumu bank and has become the first Baltic startup to join their DECTA startup programme.

“Organizing fintech startup competition exceeded our expectations,” comments VP of Rietumu bank Jevgenijs Dugajevs. “Swipe is one of startups with whom we found great synergies during the event.”

The idea comes from a previous startup the team had founded – quick location-based offer application QFer. Bootstrapping the company, they came to appreciate the value of timely working capital turnover. They have tried many solutions before opting for building their own:

“For a startup it is particularly important that customers’ payments arrive into your account fast,” explains Swipe technical co-founder Dmitrijs Angelovskis. ‘We explored numerous solutions and none has worked for us. For example, PayPal is great for transfers between friends and family, but as soon as you use it for business, they charge a hefty 5% fee. We also considered First Data, but the notable initial payment and required commitment put us off. Back then we did not even have a web page, just the app, so we chose to create our own workaround. After sharing it with others, we realized that we had just built something useful to many businesses.

Asked about how Swipe compares to the alternative, Dmitrijs reveals that Swipe comission never exceeds 3%, the onboarding process never takes more than 2 days and the team works tirelessly to ensure it is even easier and more convenient for their customers.

Swipe already has its first clients from various industries. The solution is used by tourism agencies, design studios, car rentals and other small and medium enterprises. The key need Swipe is are solving for them is to receive online payments fast, while make it easy and convenient for their customers.

Swipe also supports fast recurring invoice payments directly to your account. It automates the invoicing for the business and eliminates the distraction of recurring bills to the customer. The team is developing an API and working with bigger companies to integrate individually.

The service is available to merchants in all European Union countries, Andorra, Channel Islands, Iceland, Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Turkey and Vatican City. Any owner of Visa and MasterCard payment cards can pay for products and services.