Amsterdam, Netherlands · Startup Adyen is a global payments technology company headquartered in Amsterdam that provides a single platform for accepting payments across online, in-store, and mobile channels. Listed on Euronext Amsterdam since 2018, Adyen serves major enterprise customers including Spotify, Uber, eBay, and Microsoft. The company processes hundreds of billions of euros annually and is one of Europe's most valuable public tech companies, with a market capitalization that has exceeded $50 billion. Adyen's end-to-end approach, combining gateway, risk management, processing, and acquiring in one platform, has made it the payments infrastructure of choice for global enterprises.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Person Executive at Silk Bank, a Georgian financial institution active in digital banking and payments. He is an announced speaker at FUTURUM Payments Georgia 2026 in Tbilisi.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Aspora, formerly known as Vance, is a cross-border banking and remittance fintech for the Indian diaspora, primarily serving non-resident Indians sending money to India. It offers international money transfers at live mid-market exchange rates, alongside expanding products including currency savings accounts, bill payments, and mutual-fund investing, with further banking, credit, and insurance services planned. The company launched as Vance in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and rebranded to Aspora in April 2025. It is headquartered in London with additional offices in Bengaluru and Dubai.
Budapest, Hungary · Startup Barion is a Budapest-based licensed e-money institution and payment processor that offers online card acquiring, wallet-based payments, and embedded-payment APIs for e-commerce merchants, marketplaces, and software platforms in the CEE region. Regulated by the Hungarian central bank (MNB) and passported across the EU under its e-money license, Barion is one of the few independent merchant-acquiring alternatives to Stripe, Adyen, and the big international PSPs for merchants that specifically want a Hungarian-language, locally supported, lower-fee payment rail. The company has been growing steadily into neighboring markets and into B2B verticals like iGaming and SaaS, and serves as the local reference for fintech founders who want to understand how small EU markets can build their own regulated payment infrastructure rather than reselling others'.
Bucharest, Romania · Event A week-long fintech, blockchain, and AI gathering across multiple Bucharest venues, positioned as a Central and Eastern Europe fintech hub event with an awards gala. Useful for fintech founders targeting the CEE market and regional investors.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Checkout.com is a London-headquartered payments infrastructure company that provides a unified API for online payment processing, supporting card payments, local payment methods, and payouts across 150+ currencies. The company serves enterprise merchants including Klarna, Coinbase, Sony, and Grab, and was valued at $40 billion at its peak in 2022. Checkout.com competes directly with Adyen and Stripe in the enterprise payments space.
Prague, Czech Republic · Startup Choice provides QR payments and digital menus for restaurants, enabling faster ordering and higher table turnover. The platform is growing quickly across CEE and Eastern Europe as restaurants digitize front-of-house operations. It reduces staffing overhead while giving restaurants richer customer data. By 2026, Choice is a fast-scaling Czech restaurant-tech player.
Copenhagen, Denmark · Event Distributed fintech festival across Copenhagen hosted by Copenhagen Fintech, with sessions at banks, fintech offices, and innovation hubs. Covers payments, open banking, green finance, and insurance innovation with a Nordic lens. 3,000+ participants across the week. Most sessions free.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Person Vice President for Georgia and Armenia at Mastercard, leading payments and digital-commerce partnerships in the region. He is an announced speaker at FUTURUM Payments Georgia 2026 in Tbilisi.
Lublin, Poland · Startup Polish card-payments infrastructure provider licensed for card issuing, acquiring, and money transfer. Fenige's platform powers card-based money transfers (card-to-card push payments) and payment products for fintechs, banks, and corporates. An early Movens Capital portfolio company; exited via a strategic sale.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Venture Capital Finch Capital is an Amsterdam-based venture capital firm founded in 2013, specialising in early-stage investments in European fintech, insurtech, and financial infrastructure. The firm manages approximately $400 million across three funds, with its third European fund targeting €150 million. Finch has invested in 51 companies across the UK, Netherlands, and wider Europe, focusing on seed and Series A rounds in companies applying technology to financial services including payments, lending, insurance, and wealth management. Notable portfolio companies include BUX (European retail investing), with the firm also backing Grab in Asia, and exits including 12 acquisitions from its portfolio.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Startup Finom is an Amsterdam-based fintech company offering digital financial services for small and medium-sized enterprises, freelancers, and entrepreneurs across Europe. Its platform combines a business account with local IBANs, invoicing, business debit cards with cashback, payment processing, expense tracking, and accounting software integrations. The company operates in markets including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, and Austria. In 2025 Finom raised a €115 million Series C round led by AVP, in addition to non-dilutive growth capital from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.
Vilnius, Lithuania · Event Lithuania's flagship fintech conference reflecting Vilnius's status as a European fintech licensing hub with 200+ licensed firms. Attracts 2,000+ attendees including regulators, banks, and fintech founders. Strong focus on payments, open banking, and embedded finance.
Dublin, Ireland · Event An annual gathering of the Irish financial-services and fintech ecosystem at Dublin Docklands, with 200+ delegates. A focused, founder-relevant venue for fintech and regtech startups targeting Ireland's international financial-services cluster.
Leeds, United Kingdom · Event The tenth annual FinTech North Leeds conference, debuting a Pitch360 startup competition and backed by West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Mastercard. A direct, founder-relevant day for a Northern fintech startup to pitch, meet investors, and connect with corporates.
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom · Event The sixth annual Newcastle conference from FinTech North, the focal point for fintech in the North East. Aimed at fintech founders, banks, and investors, it covers payments, AI, fraud, and regulation — a practical day for a North-East fintech startup to meet partners and corporates.
Edinburgh, United Kingdom · Event A national fintech summit at the EICC Edinburgh, with content spanning green wealthtech, payments, and AI. Good for a Scottish or UK fintech founder wanting investor and ecosystem exposure at low cost.
London, United Kingdom · Event Billed as the UK's largest fintech festival, with nine content stages on open finance, payments, embedded finance, AI transformation, and fraud at The Brewery in London. For a fintech founder it offers broad coverage of regulatory and product trends plus access to banks and incumbents in one place.
Copenhagen, Denmark · Startup Flatpay is a Danish fintech founded in 2022 that provides card payment terminals, point-of-sale systems, and online payment solutions for small and medium-sized merchants. The company differentiates itself with a flat, transparent pricing model with no setup fees, no monthly subscriptions, and uniform rates across card types, alongside data-analytics dashboards for merchants. Headquartered in the greater Copenhagen area, it operates across several European markets including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. In November 2025 it raised a 145 million euro Series C round at a 1.5 billion euro valuation, reaching unicorn status.
Paris, France · Startup Flowdesk is a Paris-based digital-asset trading and technology firm founded in 2020 that provides market-making, liquidity, and trading infrastructure for crypto tokens and exchanges. Its platform helps token issuers and trading venues manage liquidity across fragmented crypto markets. Founded by Guilhem Chaumont, Paul Bugnot, François Cluzeau, and Balthazar Giraux, the company has expanded internationally. After a $50M Series B led by Cathay Innovation in 2023, Flowdesk raised a $102M financing announced in 2025, led by HV Capital with debt provided by BlackRock-managed funds, to scale its market-making services.
Valencia, Spain · Startup Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW) is a global payments-enablement and software company founded in Valencia as peerTransfer, simplifying high-value, complex payment flows in education, healthcare and travel across 240+ countries. Corporate HQ is now Boston with a Spanish product hub in Valencia. IPO on Nasdaq (FLYW) in 2021.
Wrocław, Poland · Startup ForActive, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Wrocław, develops a cloud-based business management app for independent personal trainers, coaches and fitness instructors. The platform lets professionals sell memberships, class packages and one-off sessions while automating payments, attendance tracking and client communication, with recurring billing, automated reminders and QR-based check-ins. It runs on a pay-as-you-go model with no fixed subscription fee.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Event A one-day industry gathering at the Paragraph Tabori (Autograph Collection) in Tbilisi focused on payment infrastructure, cross-border settlements, acquiring, banking integrations, stablecoin payments and compliance. The format includes a main stage, roundtable sessions, a networking lounge and a VIP dinner, drawing payment providers, banks, fintech startups, crypto businesses, investors and regulators.
London, United Kingdom · Startup GoCardless is a London-based fintech founded in 2011 that specialises in collecting recurring bank-to-bank payments, processing Direct Debit and open banking payments for businesses across Europe, North America and Australia. It reached unicorn status in 2022 and handles tens of billions of dollars in payment volume each year for tens of thousands of merchants.
London, United Kingdom · Person Founder and CEO of Checkout.com, the payments processor he bootstrapped before it became one of Europe's most valuable fintechs. A Swiss entrepreneur based in London, he is among the wealthiest people in UK tech.
Istanbul, Turkey · Startup iyzico is an Istanbul-founded payment processor and merchant-acquiring platform that became Turkey's most visible fintech exit when it was acquired by Naspers-owned PayU in 2019 for around USD 165 million, at the time one of the largest fintech deals in Turkish history. Founded in 2013 by Barbaros Özbugutu and Tahsin Isin, iyzico built a developer-friendly API stack for accepting card payments, recurring billing, marketplace split payments, and fraud detection in the Turkish market, and layered a 'buy now, pay later' product on top that became a default installment option for thousands of Turkish e-commerce merchants. Even inside PayU, iyzico continues to operate as the Turkish merchant payments brand and has expanded into additional financial services, making it a canonical reference for how a CEE/MENA fintech can convert a tough local regulatory environment into a defensible commercial wedge.
Istanbul, Turkey · Person Business Transformation Manager at Lulu Financial Holdings, focused on fintech transformation and cross-border payments. He is an announced speaker at Eurasia Tech Week 2026 in Istanbul.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Startup QR-based payments fintech founded in Tbilisi in 2023. Keepz enables merchants to accept payments via Apple Pay, Google Pay, bank cards, open banking, and cryptocurrency without requiring customers to download an app. The company was the first in Georgia to obtain an open banking licence and, in December 2024, helped Georgia become one of the first countries to enable tax payments via digital assets. It has onboarded over 20,000 merchants and is expanding into Turkey and Italy.
Stockholm, Sweden · Startup Klarna is a Swedish fintech company that pioneered the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) model globally. Founded in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth, and Victor Jacobsson, Klarna started by offering online shoppers in Sweden a way to purchase goods on invoice (pay after delivery). Over the next decade, the company expanded across Europe and beyond, becoming a dominant online payments provider. As of 2021, Klarna was Europe’s highest-valued private tech company at $45.6 billion, reflecting meteoric growth fueled by consumers’ appetite for installment payments. Klarna’s app and services allow users to split purchases into interest-free installments or pay later, and it partners with over 450,000 retailers worldwide, including global brands like H&M, IKEA, and Nike. The company has over 150 million users across 45 countries and handled $80 billion in transaction volume in 2021. Klarna’s journey, however, has seen dramatic swings: after reaching a $45B valuation in mid-2021, a combination of rising interest rates and tech market downturn led to a downround in 2022, cutting its valuation to $6.7 billion (an 85% drop). The company restructured, laying off 10% of its staff, and refocused on profitability. By 2023, Klarna returned to profit and saw renewed growth, aided by expanding beyond BNPL into a full shopping app with price comparison, loyalty features, and banking services (Klarna obtained a banking license in Europe in 2017). In 2025, Klarna reportedly delayed an IPO amid market volatility but ultimately went public in September 2025, raising $1.37 billion. Despite valuation fluctuations, Klarna remains the global leader in BNPL, with a strong brand among Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Its journey from a small Stockholm startup to a financial giant serving 65 million customers (2025) at one point valued at $75 billion exemplifies the rise (and resiliency) of Europe’s fintech sector.
London, United Kingdom · Person Co-founder and CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise), the cross-border payments company he started with Taavet Hinrikus to cut the cost of international money transfers. He took Wise public via a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange.
Dublin, Ireland · Accelerator Mastercard Start Path is Mastercard's flagship global startup engagement programme, launched in 2014 to connect high-growth fintechs with Mastercard's commercial network, mentorship and co-innovation resources. Unlike traditional equity accelerators it takes no equity and charges no fees; selected startups gain access to Mastercard's ecosystem of 150M+ merchants, thousands of banking partners and billions of cards. Dublin — Mastercard's sole European Technology Hub, with 2,000+ staff — anchors the programme's European engagement.
The programme runs rolling cohorts of five to fifteen startups across specialised tracks including Emerging Fintech, Acceptance, Blockchain & Digital Assets, Open Finance, Small Business, Security Solutions and the newest Agentic Commerce track (added 2026). Since inception it has engaged more than 500 startups from 60+ countries, whose alumni have raised over $25bn in follow-on capital. Notable alumni include unicorns Revolut and Thought Machine (UK), Razorpay and Zeta (India) and Airwallex, alongside European fintechs such as Doconomy (Sweden) and Irish fraud-prevention startup Urban Fox.
Warsaw, Poland · Person Co-founder and Partner at Movens Capital. 17+ years in venture capital, innovation, and fintech. CEO of SkyCash (2009–2013), scaling it into one of Poland's leading mobile payment platforms. Co-founded Business Angel Seedfund and LBA, among Poland's first organised angel networks. Focus at Movens on fintech, payments, and enterprise SaaS.
Berlin, Germany · Startup Midas (Midas Software GmbH) is a Berlin-based fintech building infrastructure for tokenised real-world assets and composable on-chain investment products. It lets strategy managers turn institutional investment strategies into compliant, blockchain-based tokens (mTokens) that aim to give investors transparency, instant redemptions, and composability across DeFi protocols. Its first product, mTBILL, tokenises US Treasury bills as an ERC-20 token so holders can earn yield on-chain. The company describes itself as a German, BaFin-regulated and MiCA-compliant entity.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Startup Payments infrastructure provider helping EU businesses accept local and global methods. Mollie is a startup based in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the growth stage. The company operates in the Payments, Fintech space. Learn more at their website.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Event Organisator Organizer of Money20/20 Europe, a flagship fintech and payments conference in Amsterdam. Money20/20 is an event organiser based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Organising events in the Events, FinTech, Payments, Financial Services space.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Event The premier global event for the fintech and financial services industry in Europe, held annually in Amsterdam, showcasing innovation and future trends in payments and commerce.
Tallinn, Estonia · Startup Montonio is an Estonian payments and post-checkout platform for e-commerce merchants. Through a single API and dashboard it offers open-banking bank-transfer payments, card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay, BLIK and Buy-Now-Pay-Later financing, alongside post-checkout tools such as shipping labels, parcel tracking, returns and refunds. The company serves merchants across the Baltics and Poland, aiming to be a unified checkout solution for the region. Its regulated payment-institution entity is registered in Lithuania while the company operates from Tallinn.
Athens, Greece · Event The 25th edition of the NextGen Payments & RegTech Forum is a one-day senior-executive fintech conference held at the Athens Marriott Hotel. Through keynotes, panels, roundtables and one-to-one meetings it covers instant and real-time payments, account-to-account transactions, digital wallets, open banking, the Digital Euro, embedded finance, fraud prevention and regulatory technology across Greece and Europe.
Copenhagen, Denmark · Event A major Nordic fintech gathering at TAP1 with around 2,000 participants, 200 fintech startups, and 150 financial institutions across roughly 100 sessions. Strong startup-to-institution matchmaking.
York, United Kingdom · Event FinTech North's pan-northern flagship, celebrating the fintech ecosystem across the North of England at the Guildhall in York. Useful for a Northern fintech founder wanting cross-regional investor and corporate connections in one summit rather than a single-city conference.
Paris, France · Event Invite-only fintech conference hosted at the Palais Brongniart, gathering 2,500+ senior executives, regulators, and investors from the global financial-services and fintech ecosystem. Content spans open banking, embedded finance, crypto regulation, payments innovation, and insurtech. Tickets EUR 1,500+.
Sopot, Poland · Startup Paymove is a Sopot-based fintech that digitises unattended and offline commerce, replacing legacy physical payment hardware with secure QR-based payments that need no app download. The company is also building payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. It is active in more than 2,000 locations in Poland and reaches over 600,000 users.
Sofia, Bulgaria · Startup Payments platform giving online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe unified access to card payments, BNPL, local payment methods and multi-currency settlement via a single integration. Raised a €5M seed, bringing total funding to €7M.
Vilnius, Lithuania · Startup Paysera, founded in 2004, became Lithuania's first licensed e-money institution when the Bank of Lithuania issued it an unlimited electronic money licence in 2012. The company offers online and in-store payment processing, international money transfers, currency exchange, and investment services to individuals and businesses in over 30 countries. It employs more than 700 people. The platform serves event organisers, e-shops, physical retailers, and private clients.
Hoofddorp, Netherlands · Startup Fintech payments provider founded in 2002 and headquartered in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, owned by Prosus/Naspers. Processes online payments for merchants across CEE, LatAm and Africa.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Startup Payze is a Tbilisi-based payment-orchestration and acquiring layer built specifically for merchants operating across the Caucasus, CIS, and Eastern European markets, where a single global PSP rarely has strong enough local rails to cover the whole corridor. The platform gives e-commerce operators and marketplaces one API for card processing, Apple Pay and Google Pay, local bank methods, tokenization, and — crucially — automated split payments that route a single customer charge to multiple beneficiaries (sellers, drivers, partners) without building custom ledger logic. Founded in 2020, Payze has raised from Y Combinator (W22 cohort) and 500 Global via the 500 Georgia/Eurasia program, and is backed locally by GITA, the Georgian Innovation and Technology Agency. It is one of the clearest examples of a Georgian B2B fintech that has converted the country's position as a regional crossroads between Europe, Turkey, and the CIS into a commercial wedge in payments infrastructure.
Sofia, Bulgaria · Startup Mobile digital wallet for contactless and peer-to-peer payments, IBAN transfers, bill payments and loyalty-card storage, with a free virtual Mastercard; payment services provided via licensed e-money firm Paynetics.
Warsaw, Poland · Startup Ramp Network is a Warsaw-founded fintech that powers fiat-to-crypto on/off-ramps embedded inside hundreds of web3 apps, wallets, and exchanges. Founded in 2017 by Szymon Sypniewicz and Przemek Kowalczyk, the company has raised funding from Balderton Capital, NfX, Galaxy Digital, and angel investors including Taavet Hinrikus and Piotr Karwatka. Ramp serves users in over 150 countries and is one of Poland's most internationally visible crypto-infrastructure startups.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Rapyd is a London-headquartered fintech-as-a-service platform founded in 2016 by Arik Shtilman and Omer Priel, enabling businesses to accept global payments, send payouts, and embed financial services through a single API. The platform supports payment methods across 100+ countries and employs over 1,600 people globally. Rapyd reached a valuation of over $8.75 billion following a $300 million funding round in 2021 and is backed by Target Global, Stripe, General Catalyst, and Tiger Global. In 2025 Rapyd acquired PayU's Latin America and Africa payment operations.
Milan, Italy · Startup Satispay is an Italian mobile payment network headquartered in Milan, founded in 2013 by Alberto Dalmasso (CEO), Dario Brignone (CTO) and Samuele Pinta (CFO). Authorised by the Bank of Italy as an e-money institution, it operates an independent payment circuit that bypasses Visa, Mastercard and traditional card rails: users link a bank account via IBAN, hold a virtual wallet and pay merchants in-store, online or peer-to-peer through SEPA mandates at low fixed fees, making it especially attractive for small-ticket transactions.
With over 6.5 million users and 450,000 merchant partners as of mid-2026, Satispay is Italy's dominant independent payment network, expanding into France, Luxembourg and Germany and into corporate welfare, buy-now-pay-later and investment products. It has raised over €500M; the 2022 Series D of €320M led by Addition (with Greyhound Capital, Coatue, Lightrock, Block and Tencent) made it Italy's second unicorn, and in June 2026 it announced plans for a further round of up to €120M.
Lisbon, Portugal · Event SBC Summit is Europe's largest gaming, igaming and sports-betting industry conference, hosted across the Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena in Lisbon's Parque das Nações. It convenes thousands of operators, technology suppliers, payments providers and investors for exhibitions, conference tracks, a startup and investment angle, and large-scale networking.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Startup Silverflow is an Amsterdam-based fintech that provides a cloud-native card payment processing platform. It offers a direct connection to the card networks via easy-to-use APIs, with features including 3D-Secure, network tokenisation, direct-to-card payouts, and dispute management based on enriched data. The company positions itself as a modern alternative to legacy payment infrastructure, serving payment service providers, payment facilitators, acquirers, and merchants. It was founded by former Adyen executives Anne Willem de Vries, Robert Kraal, and Paul Buying. Customers cited in press coverage include Deutsche Bank, Bolt, Payabl, and Buckaroo.
Istanbul, Turkey · Startup Payments and embedded finance platform offering payment processing, digital wallets, prepaid cards and FX for merchants and consumers across emerging markets. Serves 6.3M users and 25,000 merchants.
London, United Kingdom · Startup SumUp is a leading European fintech providing mobile point-of-sale card readers and a suite of financial tools for small merchants. The company serves over 4 million businesses across 35+ countries, offering card acceptance, invoicing, business accounts, and online payment links. SumUp has become the go-to payments partner for micro and small businesses across Europe and beyond, competing with Square in the SMB payments space.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Event A regional financial-innovation summit under the GFTN umbrella, focused on cross-border finance, stablecoins, tokenisation, and regional financial corridors across the Caucasus. Relevant for fintech and web3 founders navigating regional payments and regulation.
Yerevan, Armenia · Startup Text'nPayMe is a Yerevan-based fintech startup building keyboard-first payment experiences that let users initiate peer-to-peer and micro-transactions directly inside any messaging or social app, without context-switching to a separate banking application. The product takes the form of a custom mobile keyboard extension that sits above the standard typing layer and exposes send-money, request, and split-bill actions as first-class gestures. For banks and wallets the company offers the same stack as an embedded-finance SDK, so that partners can ship in-chat payments without rebuilding messaging infrastructure. Text'nPayMe emerged through the 500 Global Eurasia program and is part of a cohort of Armenian fintechs using the region's engineering depth to attack conversational commerce in emerging markets.
Stockholm, Sweden · Startup Tink is an open banking platform headquartered in Stockholm, founded in 2012 by Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg. It provides open banking APIs and services that let banks, fintechs and merchants access financial data and build their own financial products. Originally a consumer financial-management app, Tink pivoted to offer its technology to other businesses, becoming one of Europe's open banking infrastructure providers. In June 2021 Visa agreed to acquire Tink for approximately €1.8 billion, completing the deal in 2022, after which Tink became wholly owned by Visa while retaining its brand.
Vilnius, Lithuania · Startup TransferGo is a Vilnius-founded international money transfer platform launched in 2012 by Daumantas Dvilinskas and Justinas Lasevicius. The service focuses on migrant remittances, enabling fast and affordable cross-border transfers to over 160 countries. TransferGo has raised over $100 million from investors including Hard Yaka and Valar Ventures. With 350+ employees and offices in the UK, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland, the company has processed billions in transfer volume. It competes with Wise and Remitly in the migrant remittance segment and is one of the Baltics' most prominent fintech exports.
Kilkenny, Ireland · Startup TransferMate is a B2B cross-border payments infrastructure company headquartered in Kilkenny, Ireland. It provides payments-infrastructure-as-a-service and embedded payments technology that lets businesses send and receive international payments, positioning itself as a faster, lower-cost alternative to the traditional correspondent-banking model by enabling local pay-in and pay-out. The company runs a large global payments-licensing network, is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland as an Electronic Money Institution, and reached a valuation above $1 billion in May 2022, becoming an Irish fintech unicorn.
London, United Kingdom · Startup TrueLayer operates an open banking platform across Europe centered on Pay by Bank, enabling consumers to pay directly from their bank accounts rather than using cards. Its product suite includes Payments, Payouts for instant refunds and withdrawals, Bank on File for recurring payments and subscriptions, plus data, verification, and incentive add-ons. The company serves sectors including ecommerce, iGaming, financial services, travel, and crypto. TrueLayer is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, and has pursued acquisitions to expand its European footprint and add credit-at-checkout capabilities.
Stockholm, Sweden · Startup Trustly is a Stockholm-based open banking payments company founded in 2008 that enables merchants to accept direct bank payments from consumers without cards, apps, or registration. The platform connects to over 8,000 banks across Europe and North America, powering pay-by-bank experiences for e-commerce, financial services, gaming, and travel companies. Nordic Capital acquired a majority stake in 2018 and the company has grown rapidly, processing tens of billions in payment volume annually. Trustly is a key player in Europe's open banking ecosystem and the broader shift away from card-based payments.
Prague, Czech Republic · Startup Twisto is a Prague-based fintech founded in 2013 by Michal Smida, offering buy-now-pay-later and digital payment solutions across Central Europe. The platform allows consumers to defer payments at checkout and manage spending via a mobile app and virtual card, while merchants benefit from higher conversion rates. Twisto expanded into Poland and Romania before being acquired by Zip Co (Australia) in 2022 for approximately $97 million. The company helped pioneer BNPL adoption in CEE and remains a notable Czech fintech exit story.
Baku, Azerbaijan · Startup Unibank is one of Azerbaijan's leading commercial banks and has invested heavily in digital transformation, launching mobile-first banking products, contactless payment infrastructure, and fintech partnerships that position it as the country's most digitally progressive financial institution. Its innovation arm develops API-based services, digital onboarding flows, and data-driven lending products aimed at modernizing how Azerbaijani consumers and SMEs interact with financial services. Unibank's fintech initiatives are important to the local ecosystem because they create integration opportunities for startups building on open banking and embedded finance rails.
Athens, Greece · Startup Viva Wallet is an Athens-based neobank and acquiring bank that built Europe's first fully cloud-native card-acquiring platform, running on Microsoft Azure and designed from day one for SoftPOS and ISO-independent merchant onboarding. The company serves small and medium merchants across 24 European countries with Android-based payment terminals, e-commerce gateways, IBAN accounts, instant settlement, and merchant cash advance products, and crossed 500,000 merchants before the JPMorgan Chase acquisition closed. JPMorgan bought a majority stake in 2022 valuing Viva Wallet at around USD 2 billion, specifically to use its cloud-native acquiring stack as the base for Chase's own European merchant-services expansion — one of the largest strategic tech acquisitions ever done out of Greece. Founded by Haris Karonis, Viva is today the anchor of the Athenian fintech cluster and proof that payments infrastructure of global quality can be built outside of London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a London-based fintech that built a peer-to-peer international money transfer platform offering transparent, low-cost cross-border payments at the real mid-market exchange rate. Founded by Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus, Wise went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 and now serves over 16 million customers, processing billions in cross-border volume each quarter. The company has expanded into multi-currency accounts, business payments, and a platform API used by banks and large enterprises.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Zilch is a London-based fintech founded in 2018 that offers a buy-now-pay-later and payments app funded partly by advertising, letting customers pay over time at any merchant while earning rewards. It reached unicorn status and reports over one hundred million pounds of annualised revenue, positioning itself as an ad-subsidised alternative to traditional credit.