Manchester payments firm Ryft raises £20m to expand overseas

Ryft Pay Ltd, a Manchester-based payments company, has raised £20m in a Series B funding round led by Gresham House Ventures, the investor confirmed on 18 September 2026. The money is earmarked for expansion into Europe and the US and for winning larger, higher-volume business customers, according to Gresham House Ventures and reporting by Sky News published a day earlier.

The round matters to UK fintech watchers because of its size — £20m — and because Ryft's stated growth plans hinge partly on a payments licence application to Malta's financial regulator. No approval was confirmed in the sources reviewed as of 21 September 2026, and approval is not guaranteed.

What Ryft does

Ryft builds payment infrastructure for marketplaces, platforms and businesses operating across multiple locations. Its tools cover seller onboarding, recurring billing, automated split payments — dividing a single transaction between several recipients, such as a marketplace and its sellers — and cross-border payouts. In practice, this is the plumbing that lets a platform business take a customer's payment once and route the right shares to the right parties automatically.

The growth behind the round

Gresham House Ventures said Ryft now serves more than 6,500 businesses, a figure also reported by Sky News as of the announcement. Sky News additionally reported, attributing the information to Ryft, that the company's payment-processing volumes had tripled over the preceding 12 months. Gresham House Ventures described the business as having "tripled in size" — a looser phrase that may or may not refer to the same underlying metric.

Neither source disclosed the absolute transaction value or transaction count behind the tripling, the starting base it was measured against, or any independently audited figures. Readers should treat the threefold growth claim as a company-supplied metric rather than a verified market statistic. Ryft's sources also did not disclose how the more-than-6,500-business figure was defined or measured, including whether it counts direct contracted customers, end merchants reached through platform partners, or some other population.

Gresham House Ventures also said Ryft's strongest customers were growing volumes by more than 100% a year as of the announcement. That is an investor-supplied figure describing a subset of customers, not a platform-wide growth rate.

Who backed the deal, and where the money goes

Gresham House Ventures and Sky News said the funding would support expansion across Europe and the US, and a shift toward larger, high-growth and enterprise accounts. Neither source gave a timetable, a list of target markets, or a US regulatory route, and neither disclosed Ryft's valuation or how much of the £20m had actually been received at the point of announcement.

The Maltese application and what it would — and wouldn't — unlock

Central to Ryft's European ambitions is an application to the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) for a payments licence, reported by Sky News and attributed to Ryft. The MFSA is Malta's competent authority for financial institutions, including payment institutions, and has the power to grant, refuse, suspend or cancel licences. No primary MFSA record confirming approval of Ryft's application was found in the sources reviewed for this article, and applying for a licence is not the same as holding one.

Malta's financial-institution framework transposes the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), an EU directive, and includes provisions on European "passporting" — the mechanism that lets a firm authorised in one EEA state offer permitted services in others without separate authorisation in each. If the MFSA does grant Ryft the relevant authorisation, that could give the company a regulatory base to offer authorised payment services elsewhere in the European Economic Area (EEA). But this depends on three things happening in sequence: the MFSA approving the application, the scope of permissions it grants, and Ryft then completing the applicable passport notification process for each market it wants to enter. None of those steps has been confirmed as complete.

It is also worth being precise about what UK readers already know. Ryft's own website states that Ryft Pay Ltd is an FCA-authorised payment institution, firm reference number 972895 — a claim repeated by Gresham House Ventures. That is a UK authorisation. It does not, by itself, provide post-Brexit passporting rights across the EEA, which is exactly why a separate Maltese application is part of Ryft's European plan. Readers who want to check a firm's specific permissions, and what protections attach to them, should consult the Financial Conduct Authority's register directly rather than relying on a company's own description, since permissions can be limited to particular activities.

What's still unknown

Several details relevant to assessing this deal were not available in the sources reviewed:

• The MFSA application's entity, date, requested licence category, and current stage of assessment.
• The absolute figures behind the reported tripling in payment-processing volumes.
• Ryft's Series B valuation, the equity issued, and each investor's contribution.
• Whether the full £20m had been received at announcement or includes capital subject to conditions.
• A detailed timetable, target states or regulatory route for US expansion.

There is also an unexplained gap in Ryft's own history. Gresham House Ventures describes the business as founded in 2021. Companies House, however, records the legal entity — company number 12128364 — as incorporated on 30 July 2019, trading as Butlr Ltd until it changed its name to Ryft Pay Ltd on 5 February 2025. The company is listed as active with a registered office in Manchester. The sources do not explain whether the 2021 date refers to a product launch, a business pivot, or something else.

What to watch next

The clearest confirmation of Ryft's European plans would be an MFSA decision or an entry for the relevant Ryft entity on the MFSA's Financial Services Register, followed by any passport notifications covering specific EEA states. Details of a US market-entry route, and disclosure of the round's valuation, would also clarify how far this funding has actually travelled toward the expansion Gresham House Ventures and Ryft have described.