Circle Finalizes $440 Million In Financing

FinTech Circle has completed a financing round with $440 million, according to a company blog post.

The financing will be used to help Circle’s continued growth and organizational development, and to bolster market expansion opportunities as it works in digitally-native finance, the post stated.

“… Circle is now poised to meet significant global demand for its products and services aimed at marrying the existing financial system with breakthroughs in digital currency within payments and finance,” the release stated.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire spoke to PYMNTS in April and said there are some steps of digital commerce interactions that need to be smoothed out.

Allaire said there is a “stutter step” inherent in cryptocurrency transactions, and companies need to consider doing away with inefficiencies in backend processes when users pay in digital currency. The process of accepting and settling digital currency transactions takes time, adds costs and keeps FinTechs and other digital-native firms from developing new apps that can give a tailwind to crypto payments.

He said blockchain can be used to help payments go through seamlessly as issuers don’t have to take customers’ electronically stored value, convert it and then move the funds through the legacy banking system.

Allaire added that doing away with the “stutter step” could make for a new kind of ecosystem in which there would be an acknowledgement that digital dollar currencies could easily exist alongside traditional fiat.

Allaire, speaking with PYMNTS in March, also said bringing together stablecoins and blockchain could be an important step toward improving global payments. He said digital tokens can move around the internet in the same ways a photo or text can, becoming “untethered” from the centralized databases that have been the hallmarks of traditional finance.

“Money becomes an ‘actual first-class citizen’ on the internet just like the other types of data,” he said.