Ansa is aiming to address the high fees merchants in the US face for accepting credit and debit card payments, particularly when it comes to micro-transactions. Its answer is to help merchants build wallets where customer balances are embedded in the firm’s or platform’s ecosystem.

Ansa is particularly focused on what it calls “HULT merchants”: habitual use, low transaction value. These merchants have to patch together vendors, invest in a cross-team complex engineering project, and spend large sums on compliance to get a closed-loop programme live.

With Ansa, claims the firm, a merchant can create a wallet within weeks rather than quarters, thanks to a flexible, API-first wallet-as-a-service platform. customer balances embedded in a merchant or platform’s ecosystem.

The company is currently piloting with customers in the coffee and quick serve industries.

Ansa was founded by Sophia Goldberg, who spent several years in Adyen’s product and account management teams, and JT Chow, who has worked at Affirm, as well as Google.

“Overall payments in the US lag behind the world. We’re on a mission to help merchants embed payments in a way that fits their use cases best,” says Goldberg.