TrueLayer has announced a $27 million investment led by Italy’s CDP Venture Capital, adding new backing to the London-founded payments company as it expands its Pay by Bank network. The company says it operates in 22 countries and will continue hiring at its Milan engineering hub through 2027.
The announcement marks a notable Italian connection for a business founded in London in 2016 by Francesco Simoneschi and Luca Martinetti, both Italian. The investor is part of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti group, Italy’s state-backed development finance system. TrueLayer says around a quarter of its workforce is based in Italy, with 70 employees in the country; Milan is one of its core engineering locations.
What the investment supports
TrueLayer says the funding is intended to support its payment network and its growth in Europe. Pay by Bank lets a customer authorise a payment directly from a bank account using open-banking connections, rather than entering card details. A payment is initiated through the customer’s bank, which authenticates the user and approves the transfer. That differs from a card payment, even though both can be used to pay an online merchant.
The model has practical trade-offs. It gives participating merchants another way to collect money and can provide a direct account-to-account route, but its availability depends on bank connectivity, customer authorisation and the payment journeys offered by individual businesses. It is not a universal replacement for cards: consumers may still use cards or other methods, and a bank payment is not necessarily reversible on the same basis as a card purchase. The announcement does not set out new consumer protections or changes to payment rules.
The company says its network is used by more than 30 million European consumers and supports payments for businesses including Ryanair and Just Eat. Those are company-reported reach figures and examples, not a measure of the share of European payments handled by the service. The funding announcement does not disclose a company valuation, the size of any individual investor’s contribution, or the identities of all members of the investor group. It also does not describe the investment as a particular financing-round type.
A Milan engineering hub
Continuing recruitment in Milan is one of the clearest local commitments in the announcement. The company says its Italian team builds products used by businesses and consumers across Europe, and that it expects hiring there to continue through 2027. The statement does not provide a target headcount, job numbers, roles or timetable, so the pledge indicates ongoing recruitment rather than a quantified expansion.
CDP Venture Capital presents the investment as part of its backing for Italian talent and European payment infrastructure. The organisation says it manages 15 funds with more than €4.9 billion in resources. That broader mandate helps explain why the transaction has an industrial and national-development dimension as well as a commercial one: a domestic investment institution is supporting a company whose founders are Italian and whose engineering presence includes Milan, while the business was established in London and serves multiple European markets.
Competition over payment infrastructure
TrueLayer’s pitch sits within a wider European discussion about how everyday digital payments are routed. Bank-account payments, card networks and newer account-to-account services are competing and complementary options. European policymakers and payment companies have discussed building more regional alternatives, but this funding does not itself establish that payment dependence has changed or that consumers will switch from cards.
The announced amount and hiring intention are concrete; the longer-term results remain open. The company has not published financial terms beyond the headline investment, and the announcement gives no valuation or forecast for transaction volumes. Whether the backing produces wider adoption will depend on merchants integrating the service, banks maintaining reliable connections and customers choosing it at checkout. For now, the immediate signals are fresh capital for the network and a stated continuation of engineering recruitment in Milan.
