Ashfords has advised Form3, the leading cloud-native payment technology provider on an investment from global payment technology leader Mastercard and a partnership agreement that will see Form3 and Mastercard help banks and financial institutions around the world connect with domestic and international payment platforms more seamlessly, reliably and securely.

This additional funding follows $33m raised in August this year from new investors; Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society and venture capital firm 83North.

Ashfords has acted for the Company since its incorporation in 2016. In the last four years, Form3 has built a cloud-native, API led payments technology platform to enable financial institutions to securely and efficiently run and scale their critical payments infrastructure through a fully managed service. Form3’s capabilities are complimentary to Mastercard’s leading account to account payments technology which supports real time and batch payment systems globally.

In 2020,  Form3 has doubled its headcount and next year will follow a similar trend. Form3 recently announced it has become a certified UK Faster Payments Aggregator with Pay.UK and in 2021 it is expected to handle a significant percentage of all UK Faster Payments as well as offering the complete SEPA suite for European payments.

Suzie Miles, Commercial Partner in Ashfords' Technology team said “This transaction follows-on from the Company’s $33 million raise during the summer and is testament to the Company’s growth and maturity delivering highly secure, best in class technology for major financial institutions globally. The partnership with Mastercard will only accelerate the Company’s ambitions to grow on an international scale”.

Suzie Miles (Commercial) led on the partnership agreement whilst Giles Hawkins led on corporate aspects of the transaction. The Ashfords team included Iona Jones (Corporate), Charlotte Kingman (Data Protection) and Hannah Petit (Commercial).