A UK FinTech startup is celebrating a big new funding round: Manchester-based Nivo brought in £2 million from GP Bullhound, the Angel CoFund, and EG Solutions CEO Elizabeth Gooch, and other investors.

The startup only just launched in late 2018 as a spinoff from Barclays Bank, and specializes in secure instant messaging for financial services firm. The idea is to offer a service that lets end customers confidently do business with their banks on an IM basis, and it’s a concept that has been catching on quickly: Recounting his company’s success in a blog post, Nivo co-founder Matthew Elliott explains that his firm got an early foothold with credit unions, and has already processed more than £20 million in loans and served over 30,000 customers.

Security is obviously a critical component of this kind of service, and on that front Nivo is taking advantage of identity verification technology from Onfido, which specializes in selfie-based biometric authentication, applying facial recognition to images of end users and their identity documents in order to match them. Onfido itself has attracted considerable attention from investors, having recently raised $50 million through a funding round of its own.

As for Nivo, it’s now working with larger financial institutions including Sainsbury’s Bank and Shawbrook Bank, and Elliott is confident his firm’s upwards trajectory will continue. “We feel we’ve just started to scratch the surface of the opportunity of what we can achieve and we’re excited to shift in to our next stage,” he writes.

Sources: BusinessCloud, Nivo Blog

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)