Open finance specialist Fabrick acquires UK paytech Judopay

Established in 2012, Judopay currently handles over 60 million transactions a year worth over €2 billion via its mobile-centric payments platform solution. It works with the likes of KFC, PaybyPhone, BUPA, Sigma Sports, and Autocab, and has been a partner for Apple (in launching Apple Pay in-app payments in the UK) and Mastercard (to enhance Click2Pay and Pay by Bank App). It also got picked by the UK government to help it drive adoption of digital payments in the public sector.

Judopay says its “100% cloud-based technology stack has been completely re-engineered over the past four years”. It claims that its “new infrastructure-as-code, micro-services stack (named Sho~dan) offers merchants of all sizes a highly performant, resilient platform with limitless global capacity”.

Judopay will continue operating under its own brand.

Fabrick says the acquisition is “a major step forward in its internationalisation process and expansion in the UK” and will enhance its flagship Payment Orchestra platform.

Founded in 2017 with HQ in Milan, Italy, Fabrick describes itself as “a European pioneer in open finance”.

Together with its subsidiary Axerve (launched in the UK in early 2022), it provides payment orchestration services as a payment facilitator and gateway aggregator, and open banking services through its licence as an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) and Payment Information Service Provider (PISP) passported to 11 countries in Europe.

It has offices in London, Madrid, and Zurich.

The UK is a lucrative market, Fabrick says, as it is the largest digital payments market in Europe. The total transaction value of the UK digital payments sector is forecast to reach almost $440 billion in 2023 (according to FinTech Digital Market Insights, Statista, 2022).

The e-commerce industry in the UK had an estimated overall revenue of $199.9 billion in 2022 (up by $22.4 billion since 2021, representing an 11% increase), Fabrick says, which “makes the UK the ideal country to develop new models and standards of embedded finance”.