Ansa - Bringing Digital Wallets To the Masses

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Company & Team Introduction

Ansa is a Wallet-as-a-Service company designed to enable any company to spin up a digital wallet program for their customers in a fraction of the time it would take to build one in-house. The startup was founded in 2022 by a pair of Fintech specialists: Sophia Goldberg (CEO), who previously worked as a product manager at European payments giant Adyen, and JT Cho (CTO), a UPenn software engineering graduate and formerly worked at Affirm and Google. With knowledge from their prior jobs, the duo was well acquainted with the many inefficiencies of the Fintech industry. They got to work trying to solve one of the biggest problems they saw during their fintech stints; there were many businesses where the best/most loyal customers cost them the most. Ansa is based in San Francisco, California and has grown its team size to ~11.

Product Overview

Ansa’s Wallet-as-a-Service API empowers companies to quickly create a closed-loop digital wallet program for their customers. Digital wallet programs can drive massive value to businesses and their customers through features like enabling businesses to offer features such as prepaid balances, helping increase customer loyalty, incentives which allow companies to reward their top customers with credits and other incentives to use with the brand, and seamless refunds to customers, helping reduce credit card refund fees while improving customer experience and retention. Another fantastic feature of Ansa’s APIs is that businesses can minimize the amount of pesky transaction fees from Visa and Mastercard, which quickly add up, especially if the company does a lot of high-volume, low-order value transactions. Building an in-house solution that is scalable, secure, compliant, and user-friendly interface is no easy feat. An in-house solution would require massive engineering resources, time, and rigorous testing; with Ansa, companies can launch their new wallet program in weeks, not quarters.

Total Addressable Market

Digital wallets have had massive secular tailwinds over the past decade as the world transitions to a cashless world, creating an enormous market for digital wallets. A perfect example of a successful digital wallet is Starbucks; they have over 75M customers using their rewards system today. In 2020, the digital wallet market was already as large as 7.42B, with analysts projecting a staggering 28.3% CAGR through 2030, ballooning the company’s total addressable market to north of 54B.

Business Model & The Numbers

Ansa’s business model is simple; they charge companies a recurring monthly fee to use their APIs. The company doesn’t offer self-service options due to the complexity of its product. One thing is clear: Ansa’s APIs drive real results, reducing business transaction fees by as much as 12%. In the US, credit and debit cards make up about 57% of all transactions, 40B transactions per year in the US alone; looking at a global scale, over 470B transactions, it’s time for businesses to take back the margin that is rightfully theirs; and a great way to reduce reliance on the dominate positions of Visa and Mastercard.

Traction

Ansa has seen excellent early traction and is driving incredible customer results. The company product currently can serve customers from various verticals, but Ansa’s platform is best suited for what they refer to as HULT (habitual use; low transaction) users like coffee shops & QSRs, marketplaces, and platforms, and other vendors where customers are making frequent purchases at small dollar amounts. Compass Coffee uses Ansa to power its stored value wallet in its mobile app and has seen impressive results. Features such as auto-reload, bonuses, and referrals from Ansa’s incentive engine drove staggering results, including a 30% increase in visits, a 26% increase in revenue, and a 65% increase in engagement for the shop, all while reducing payment fees by 28% for Compass.

Competitors

Ansa’s competitive position in the closed-loop digital wallet API landscape is highly favourable. Here is a short breakdown of one of Ansa’s main competitors:

Youtap.com - Youtap also offers white-label digital wallet solutions for businesses, helping them reduce transaction fees and the ability to provide rewards and incentives to customers. The company was started in 2007 by Chris Jones in Auckland, New Zealand. The company has a history of management issues, with leaks that the ex-CTO attempted to oust the CEO in 2023, his second attempt at doing so. The company has scaled their team to around ~40 employees, and the company most recently raised in 2018, backed by a 35M investment from Salim Group.

Furthermore, when it comes to API companies, always ask: How hard is it to build an in-house solution? In the case of Ansa, many companies cannot afford to build a digital wallet in-house, as both creating and maintaining these wallet programs are quite complex. Building in-house requires companies to take significant amounts of time and engineering resources to develop their own; programs must be scalable, secure, and compliant with the endless financial regulations while offering customers a pleasant, low-friction experience, or wallet adoption will suffer. Ansa extracts all that complexity, allowing engineers to get back to working on the actual product.

Funding

Ansa has only raised 1 round of funding thus far, an impressive 5.4M seed round in 2023. The round was led by Bain Capital Partners’ Christina Kyriazi, with several other top names in the valley also participating, including firms like BoxGroup, Susa Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Reshape, The Fintech Fund, and top angel investors within the fintech vertical like Zach Perret (Founder, Plaid) and Rokul Rajaram (Product exec, Doordash). The round had strong female participation, with over 75% of capital provided by female VCs.

Job Opportunities

We are thrilled to bring this opportunity to our readers; Ansa is currently hiring utilizing peer2peer.app, a social hiring platform, via peer-to-peer referrals. Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to join one of the top fintech startups in the world. Ansa is looking to hire experienced candidates for the following roles:

• Full stack developer; front-end focus

• Full stack developer, backend focus

For more information, Check out Ansa’s post on Peer2Peer.