The introduction happened on the way to a brewery. In 2011, at a founders' event in Dublin run by Paddy Cosgrave, the investor Fred Destin mentioned an opportunity to Jos White of Notion Capital as they headed for the Guinness factory. White later recalled it as the first he heard of Currencycloud.
By then the company was four years old, and it did not have that name. Nigel Verdon founded it in 2007 as FX Capital, and he was one of the early people to see that moving money across borders could be a piece of software rather than a bank counter.
What the story rarely mentions is how small it still was when real money arrived.
The pain was easy to feel. Cross-border payments were slow, expensive and full of hidden fees, controlled by banks that had no reason to change. Verdon's idea was transparent, low-cost payments delivered through the cloud.
What the story rarely mentions is how small it still was when real money arrived. In 2012 Notion led a Series A alongside Fred Destin at Atlas and Sean Park at Anthemis. The company had just hired Mike Laven as CEO and rebranded as Currencycloud. It was making about GBP 1m in revenue and moving about GBP 25m a month. Modest, but the shape of the business was clear: sell the plumbing, not the storefront.
Over the next decade the customers who plugged into that plumbing were the fintechs that would reshape British banking, among them Monzo, Starling and Revolut. By June 2021 the platform had processed more than GBP 2bn in transactions for nearly 500 customers in 180 countries.
The ending was neither an IPO nor a failure. Visa, which had invested in an $80m round in early 2020 that sources put at around a $500m valuation, agreed in July 2021 to buy the whole company in a deal valued at $963m (GBP 700m). Visa already owned a stake, which reduced what it actually paid. For Notion's White it closed roughly nine years of involvement.
The quiet insight for a founder is how little glamour built it. Currencycloud made its fortune by being the dull infrastructure other people's products stood on, and its journey from FX Capital to a near-billion-dollar exit took fourteen years.