Powering the Shift to Instant Money Movement: Why We Invested in TabaPay
When consumers or businesses fund an account, send money peer-to-peer (P2P), get a paycheck advance, take a loan, collect a refund or receive an insurance claim, they increasingly expect money to move instantly. That expectation is creating one of the most important shifts in payments infrastructure today.
For decades, most money movement (in and out) relied on systems designed around days-long settlement cycles. But a growing number of financial products and digital experiences require funds to be available instantaneously and securely. As that shift accelerates, we believe a new generation of infrastructure providers is emerging to power it.
That’s what led us to TabaPay.
Instant, low-cost and low-risk payments are becoming the new standard
The shift toward faster money movement is now a requirement across the highest-growth categories in financial services.
Earned wage access providers need to deliver wages in seconds. Digital banks want customers to fund accounts instantly. Lenders need to disburse loans in real time. Marketplaces, gig platforms and remittance providers increasingly compete on the customer experience, which includes how quickly funds are received. Historically, these experiences were difficult to deliver and expensive. Traditional payment methods often involved multiple intermediaries, delayed settlement and operational complexity that slowed innovation and led to poor end-user experiences.
Today, newer payment rails such as Visa Direct, Mastercard Send, RTP and FedNow are changing what’s possible. The result is a large and rapidly expanding market for real-time money movement – Visa alone reported Visa Direct instant-debit volumes growing nearly 30% year-over-year, now exceeding 12 billion run-rate transactions.
We believe this shift is still in its early stages.
TabaPay has built a differentiated position in a growing market
TabaPay has spent years building infrastructure specifically designed for instant money movement. Through a single platform, the company connects customers to multiple payment rails, banking partners and payment networks while providing the routing, compliance and operational capabilities required to move money instantaneously and securely.
What stood out to us was not simply the technology but the position TabaPay occupies within the ecosystem. Many broader payments companies view instant payments as one feature among many. TabaPay has built its business around this category from the beginning. That focus has helped the company establish deep expertise across use cases such as account funding, earned wage access, digital banking, lending, remittances and others. As transaction volumes scale, that specialization becomes increasingly valuable to both existing and future customers.
That focus is also reflected in the team behind the business. Co-founder and CEO Rodney Robinson has spent decades in payments and previously founded and led multiple payments companies, bringing deep domain expertise and pattern recognition to TabaPay’s strategy and execution.
The infrastructure behind instant payments is complex
Moving money instantly sounds simple from the consumer’s perspective. In reality, enabling that experience requires significant infrastructure behind the scenes.
Providers must connect to multiple payment networks, maintain sponsor bank relationships, manage fraud and compliance requirements, optimize routing decisions, and deliver high levels of uptime and reliability. Most businesses do not want to build and maintain that infrastructure themselves. Instead, they increasingly rely on specialized partners that can abstract away the complexity and allow them to focus on their end customers.
This is where TabaPay’s approach sets it apart. Its routing and operational capabilities support complex, high-volume money movement. Throughout our diligence, we consistently heard that TabaPay’s reliability, network expertise and operational execution are important parts of its value proposition, alongside the underlying technology.
This complexity is largely invisible to the end user, but its importance becomes clear when payments fail.
Why TabaPay fits FTV’s payments thesis
At FTV, we’ve spent years investing behind the modernization of financial infrastructure, payments and digital commerce. We believe the movement toward faster, lower risk, lower cost and more flexible payment experiences remains one of the most durable themes in fintech and digital commerce.
TabaPay sits at the center of that evolution.
The company has built a strong position in a category benefiting from powerful secular tailwinds, serves a growing set of mission-critical use cases and is led by an experienced management team with deep payments expertise.
Looking ahead, we believe the acquisition of Transact Bank further differentiates TabaPay by expanding its ability to deliver integrated, low-cost, low-risk and compliant money movement solutions while enhancing the customer value proposition over time.
We’re excited to partner with Rodney Robinson, Manoj Verma and the entire TabaPay team as they continue helping businesses move money faster, more efficiently and with greater confidence.
