Alternatives to Currencies Direct

Pleo

🇩🇰 Denmark

Pleo is a Danish spend management platform that hands employees a company card and removes the expense report from the equation entirely. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, both early employees at Tradeshift — where Rindom was CFO and lived the problem daily. Their observation was simple: consumer payments had gone frictionless while business payments were still stranded in paper receipts and month-end spreadsheet reconciliation. The mechanic is straightforward. Employees get physical or virtual Mastercards with limits set by finance. When they buy something, the app prompts them to photograph the receipt on the spot, categorises the transaction automatically, and pushes it through to the accounting system. The claim form, the reimbursement cycle, and the shoebox of receipts all disappear — and finance sees spending as it happens rather than three weeks after the fact. The platform has since grown well beyond cards. Pleo now handles supplier invoices end to end — capture, approval, payment, and bookkeeping — alongside reimbursements for out-of-pocket spend and integrations with accounting tools including Xero and QuickBooks, with credit lines and payroll on the roadmap. It serves more than 40,000 businesses across 16 European countries, employs around 950 people, and runs offices in Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Amsterdam, and Chennai. Pleo has raised roughly $434 million across nine rounds from investors including Kinnevik, Creandum, Bain Capital Ventures, and Thrive Capital. It reached a $4.7 billion valuation in December 2021, following a $150 million Series C that made it a unicorn earlier that year — a peak-era mark that has not been publicly revisited since. Its competitive set is the European spend management cohort: Spendesk, Payhawk, and Moss, with SAP Concur as the incumbent it was built to displace.

Founded 2015

Kantox

🇪🇸 Spain

Kantox sits at the intersection of corporate finance and fintech, solving a problem that has plagued treasurers and CFOs for decades: the cost and complexity of managing foreign exchange. Rather than forcing companies through the byzantine world of traditional banks or crude hedging tools, Kantox built a platform that lets businesses buy and sell currency with transparency, speed, and intelligence. The platform aggregates liquidity from multiple sources—banks, non-bank liquidity providers, and peer matching—and surfaces the best rates in real time. No more vendor lock-in, no more opaque spreads, no more waiting. A mid-market company can execute a multi-million euro FX trade in minutes, seeing exactly what they're paying and why. What sets Kantox apart in a crowded treasury tech space is its refusal to abstract away the mechanics. The platform shows you the market, then lets you trade. It's designed for finance professionals who know what they're doing and want control back from intermediaries. The company has built serious depth in emerging markets and supply chain currencies, which most legacy providers still treat as afterthoughts. Kantox represents a broader shift in European fintech: the recognition that some of the most valuable problems live in the unglamorous corners of corporate finance, where even small improvements in execution cost save companies millions annually. In that sense, it's doing for FX what more visible fintechs have done for payments—stripping away friction and opacity from a process that should have been digital decades ago.

Founded 2009

Mooncard

🇫🇷 France

Mooncard is a French-born corporate card platform that treats company spending like it actually matters. Built for mid-market businesses tired of expense report theatre, it combines physical and virtual cards with real-time spend visibility and automated compliance—no more spreadsheets, no more manual reconciliation, no more explanations that take longer than the purchase itself. The platform issues cards to employees while maintaining absolute control at the center. Managers see transactions as they happen, approval workflows happen instantly, and accounting teams get data that's actually usable. It's less about giving employees freedom and more about giving finance teams their sanity back. Unlike American corporate card incumbents that charge per card and treat integration like a favour, Mooncard pricing is transparent and the API connects to your actual accounting system. In Europe, where regulatory requirements and multi-currency complexity are facts of life, that matters. It's particularly resonant in France and across Western Europe, where the mid-market had essentially given up on tools that work. The company sits in a competitive space—Brex and others are moving downmarket, while legacy corporate card providers are finally waking up. But Mooncard's positioning is distinctly European: designed for how mid-sized companies actually spend money here, not adapted from American assumptions. That localised approach has made it one of the few European fintech companies that's actually winning on its home turf.

Founded 2016

Ebury

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Ebury is a London-based fintech that's quietly become one of Europe's most ambitious cross-border payment platforms for small and mid-sized businesses. Built for founders and finance teams who spend too much time juggling currency conversions, hedging risk, and waiting days for international transfers, Ebury strips away the friction that traditional banks left behind. The platform handles the full spectrum of what mid-market companies actually need: sending money across borders at better rates, managing foreign exchange exposure without needing a treasury team, collecting payments in dozens of currencies, and—increasingly—accessing working capital tied to those flows. It's not a flashy consumer app; it's infrastructure that makes international growth less exhausting. Unlike the volume-chasing payment processors or the idealistic startups that oversimplified cross-border payments, Ebury positioned itself as the pragmatic middle ground. It embedded deep relationships with regional banks while building technology that works at scale. The company has expanded beyond its British roots into major European markets, growing a client base that ranges from e-commerce sellers to manufacturing firms that actually need sophisticated FX management, not just cheaper wires. Ebury represents a maturing fintech category: the infrastructure play that's neither a bank nor a simple API, but rather a new kind of financial operating system for companies doing serious international business.

Founded 2012

Tradeshift

🇩🇰 Denmark

Tradeshift runs the operating system for global commerce—a cloud platform that lets businesses transact with each other in real time, from purchase orders to invoices to payments. It's built for a world where finance teams spend less time on manual reconciliation and more time on strategy, where supply chain visibility is instant, and where cash flow stops being a guessing game. The company sits at the intersection of procurement, invoice management, and working capital, connecting enterprises with their supplier networks. Rather than forcing companies to adopt yet another SaaS tool, Tradeshift embeds itself into the workflows that already exist—automating the grunt work of B2B commerce that still happens through email, spreadsheets, and PDF attachments. Trodeshift's positioning is distinctly European: it understands the complexity of multi-regional supply chains, VAT compliance, and the regulatory layers that global companies navigate daily. While American fintech still obsesses over consumer-facing dashboards, Tradeshift has spent years building the unglamorous but essential plumbing that keeps enterprise trading flowing. In an era where digital transformation is finally table stakes for large corporates, Tradeshift has become infrastructure—the kind that companies discover they can't function without. It's not the flashiest story in fintech, but it's one of the most resilient.

Founded 2010

Revolut

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Nik Storonsky was born in Dolgoprudny, Russia, and moved to London in 2006 to work as an equity derivatives trader, first at Lehman Brothers and later at Credit Suisse. Vlad Yatsenko was a software engineer who'd spent years building financial systems. In 2015 they sat down and asked a question that should have occurred to banks years earlier: why does spending money abroad still cost so much? The answer they built was Revolut — initially a prepaid card with no foreign exchange fees, then a multi-currency account, then a trading platform, then an insurance product, then a business banking offering, then something that's increasingly hard to describe as anything other than a full financial operating system. Revolut didn't unbundle banking so much as rebuild it from scratch for people who found the existing version frustrating and expensive. The numbers now are genuinely striking for a company that started with two people and a card. Revenue reached £4.5 billion in 2025, up 46% year on year, with pre-tax profit rising 57% to £1.7 billion. The customer base has passed 75 million retail users, plus 767,000 businesses. The company employs more than 12,000 people and operates in more than 40 markets. In July 2026, a secondary share sale valued Revolut at $115 billion — up from $75 billion just eight months earlier, and more than the market capitalisation of Barclays. It remains Europe's most valuable private technology company by a wide margin. The milestone that mattered most arrived in March 2026: a full UK banking licence from the Prudential Regulation Authority, ending a five-year application process that had become one of the most-watched regulatory sagas in European fintech. The licence means Revolut can now protect UK deposits up to £120,000, offer authorised consumer credit, and compete directly with high street banks for mortgage and lending business. It's the piece that transforms Revolut from a very successful payments app into a regulated bank. The global licensing map is filling in quickly, with one persistent gap. In July 2026 Revolut became the first global fintech granted a full Australian Deposit-taking Institution licence by APRA — a regulator whose capital requirements have defeated several domestic neobanks — and launched Revolut Bank Australia. In August it secured a French banking licence, a significant step given that France is its largest European market outside the UK and that holding a local licence rather than passporting from Lithuania changes how it can compete there on lending and deposits. It has also opened its first bank outside Europe, in Mexico. The exception is the United States, where a banking charter application filed in 2024 remains pending — in a period when the OCC has rejected applications from both Wise and bunq. Around the licences, the product keeps widening past banking: private markets access for European retail customers through funds from Apollo, Ares and Partners Group; a partnership with OpenAI bringing ChatGPT Go to premium tiers; eSIM data plans; and an airport lounge network starting in Copenhagen. The original thesis — that banking could be cheaper, faster, and simpler — hasn't changed. What has changed is that Revolut is no longer only selling banking.

Founded 2015

Adyen

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff had already built and sold one payments company when they sat down in 2006 to start again. The result was Adyen — the name literally means "start over" in Surinamese — and the premise was simple: instead of stitching together the same fragmented payment infrastructure everyone else was using, they would build the whole thing themselves from scratch. That decision, made in an Amsterdam office nearly two decades ago, is still the reason Adyen is different. Most payment companies are assemblers — they buy a gateway here, a processor there, bolt them together and hope for the best. Adyen owns its own technology stack end to end, which means a merchant integrating once gets access to card processing, local payment methods, point-of-sale terminals, and real-time settlement data through a single platform. No middle layers, no reconciliation headaches, no finger-pointing between vendors when something breaks. The client list tells you everything about where Adyen sits in the market. McDonald's, Spotify, Microsoft, LVMH, H&M — these are companies with serious payment volumes and zero appetite for systems that don't work. Adyen became the default choice for enterprises that had outgrown the limitations of traditional payment stacks and needed something that could handle global scale without buckling. Since going public on Euronext Amsterdam in 2018, Adyen has grown into one of Europe's most valuable technology companies, with around 4,300 employees across 23 countries and net revenue of just under €2 billion in 2024. It remains headquartered in Amsterdam and consistently profitable — a combination that's rarer in fintech than it should be. For businesses that treat payments as infrastructure rather than an afterthought, Adyen is the benchmark everything else gets measured against.

Founded 2006

Klarna

🇸🇪 Sweden

Three Stockholm School of Economics students pitched an idea at a university entrepreneurship competition in 2005: let shoppers receive goods before they pay, and put the credit risk on the merchant side. The pitch finished last. They built it anyway. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth, and Victor Jacobsson launched what was originally called Kreditor, later renamed Klarna, and spent the next two decades turning that rejected idea into one of Europe's most recognised fintech brands. The core insight held up: millions of people would rather split a purchase into three instalments than reach for a credit card, and merchants would pay for the privilege of offering that option because it reduces cart abandonment and increases average order values. Klarna grew from a Swedish checkout button into something considerably more complex. It now holds a banking licence in Sweden, offers savings accounts, issues its own card, and operates across more than 45 markets with around 93 million active consumers and 675,000 merchant partners at the end of 2024. The US, which Klarna entered in 2015, has become its largest market by revenue, a fact the company underlined by listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025 under the ticker KLAR, raising $1.37 billion at IPO. The financial trajectory has been bumpy. Klarna reported net income of $21 million in 2024, a return to profitability after a bruising 2022 that included an 85% valuation cut and significant layoffs that reduced headcount from over 7,000 to around 3,400. What survived the restructuring was a leaner company with $2.81 billion in revenue and a clearer strategic direction: AI. Klarna's partnership with OpenAI produced a customer service assistant it claims handles the equivalent of 700 full-time agents, and generative AI now manages roughly two-thirds of customer chats. The honest assessment of where Klarna sits today: it's no longer purely a BNPL provider and it's not quite a bank. It's somewhere in between, a consumer finance platform that knows more about your shopping behaviour than your bank does, and is betting that's worth a lot.

Founded 2005

Wise

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus were two Estonians living in London with the same annoying problem in opposite directions — one paid in pounds needing euros, the other the reverse — and the same discovery that their banks were charging them for the privilege while quoting an exchange rate that wasn't the real one. Their fix was a private arrangement between themselves. Formalised as TransferWise in 2011, it became one of the most genuinely useful ideas in European fintech: don't send money across borders at all. Hold accounts in each country, match inbound and outbound flows domestically, and charge a transparent fee for the matching. No SWIFT chain, no correspondent banks, no hidden spread. The company built its brand on publishing the true cost of the alternative, and for over a decade that transparency was the product. The business it became is substantial. Wise moves tens of billions of pounds across borders annually for consumers and businesses, has been consistently profitable, and operates Wise Platform — infrastructure sold to banks and fintechs that want cross-border capability without building it. In May 2026 the company moved its primary listing from the London Stock Exchange to Nasdaq under the ticker WSE, a decision that drew a great deal of comment in the UK about the attractiveness of London as a venue for technology companies. Then 2026 turned difficult, and the honest version of that story is heavier than the headlines suggested. In June, the Brussels Public Prosecutor's Office was reported to be investigating Wise Europe — the Belgian subsidiary through which the group runs its European Economic Area operations — over roughly €500 million in suspicious transactions, with alleged links to fraud, corruption, and drug trafficking. Prosecutors had reportedly noticed Wise accounts appearing in hundreds of cross-border judicial assistance requests from more than 30 European countries. Shares fell sharply. In July, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency denied Wise's application for a national trust bank charter, and the language of the decision was unusually direct: the application presented "significant supervisory and compliance concerns," and proposed management and directors had demonstrated a "persistent inability" to manage money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk. The OCC's letter also cited state regulatory actions against Wise — a July 2025 multi-state consent order requiring Wise's US arm to pay $4.2 million and overhaul its Bank Secrecy Act and AML programmes. A proposed securities class action followed in the Southern District of New York at the end of July. Wise denies wrongdoing, says it is cooperating with the authorities, and told the market its compliance programmes have evolved significantly since the original application was filed. It intends to submit a new charter application under the GENIUS Act framework. All of that is fair to state, and none of the allegations has been established: an investigation is not a finding, and securities class actions follow share price falls as a matter of routine. But two things are already true regardless of outcome. The denial was a rare public rejection from a regulator that had spent the preceding months approving trust charters for Circle, Ripple, Paxos, Coinbase, and others — meaning it was a judgement about Wise specifically rather than a closed door in general. And the charter's absence has a concrete cost: without it, Wise has no direct Federal Reserve access and continues routing US dollar flows through partner banks, which is exactly the dependency and margin leakage the application was meant to remove. The honest read is uncomfortable for a company whose entire brand is built on being the straightforward one. Wise remains a profitable, well-run business with genuinely better economics than the incumbents it disrupted, and its consumer proposition is unaffected. But the compliance findings now recur across multiple entities, jurisdictions, and regulators — the same control domains each time, over several years — and the OCC has escalated what could have been read as a subsidiary problem to an enterprise-level one. For every European fintech queuing behind Wise for a US charter, Revolut included, the bar just became visible and it is higher than expected.

Founded 2011

N26

🇩🇪 Germany

Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal started in Vienna in 2013 with a product that sounds strange now and sounded stranger then: a prepaid card for teenagers, controlled by their parents through an app. The pivot came quickly. What they had actually built was a mobile-first banking interface, and the teenagers were incidental. Relaunched as N26 and relocated to Berlin, it became the first of the European neobanks to look genuinely modern — instant push notifications on every transaction, sign-up in minutes by video identification, an interface that made incumbent German banking apps look like they had been designed by a committee, which they had. In 2016 N26 received its own full German banking licence from BaFin, three years after founding, an unusually fast route to becoming a real bank. Growth followed, and then the growth became the problem. BaFin, which had granted the licence, concluded that N26's controls had not scaled with its customer base. In 2021 the regulator imposed a growth cap limiting the bank to roughly 50,000 new customers per month — a restriction with no real precedent for a German bank — alongside a special monitor and fines relating to late suspicious activity reports. The cap was lifted in 2024 after substantial investment in compliance, financial crime prevention, and internal controls, but it cost N26 the better part of three years at exactly the moment Revolut and Monzo were compounding. The company also withdrew from the UK after Brexit and exited the US, narrowing to its European core. The company that emerged is a different one, and its leadership reflects that. Both founders have stepped back from executive roles, with Mike Dargan — previously group technology head at UBS — appointed chief executive. In August 2026 the refresh reached the rest of the C-suite: CFO Arnd Schwierholz, who steered the bank through the BaFin period, announced he is stepping away with a search under way for a successor, while N26 hired Nathalie Picquot from Santander as Chief Growth and Marketing Officer and Marcin Pakulnicki from ING as Chief Technology Officer. The pattern is unmistakable and increasingly common among mature neobanks: the executives now being recruited come from the incumbent banks the challengers were built to replace, because the problems have changed from product-market fit to regulatory scale. N26 serves millions of customers across the eurozone with a product set that has broadened well past the original current account — savings, investments including ETFs and crypto, insurance, and a subscription tier structure that has been the company's answer to interchange-dependent economics since long before that became fashionable. Its onboarding runs on Fourthline's identity verification, one of several European fintech supply-chain relationships this directory tracks. The strategic position is coherent but no longer leading: N26 is the eurozone-native neobank, strongest in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Spain, competing against a Revolut that is now valued at $115 billion and licensed on three continents, and a Monzo generating £1.7 billion in revenue from a single market. The three years spent fixing what BaFin found were three years not spent building, and the current chapter is about whether an institutionally rebuilt N26 can convert regulatory soundness back into growth.

Founded 2013

Mollie

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Adriaan Mol built Mollie's first backend while living with his parents in the Netherlands in 2004. No investors, no office, no team — just a founder and an idea that small businesses deserved a payment integration that didn't require a team of lawyers and a six-month setup process. He bootstrapped it for over fifteen years before taking outside funding in 2019. By then, Mollie had already grown into one of the most important payment platforms in European e-commerce, entirely on the back of a product that developers actually liked using. The proposition is straightforward: one API, one dashboard, and access to the payment methods that actually matter across Europe. That means iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna and SEPA Direct Debit everywhere, alongside cards, Apple Pay, and a growing list of local methods that would otherwise require separate integrations and separate acquirer relationships. Mollie handles the compliance, the fraud monitoring, and the settlement complexity. Merchants get a clean interface and a single invoice. For the 250,000 businesses using Mollie today — ranging from Gymshark and Wild to local bakeries and market stalls, as CEO Koen Köppen regularly points out — the appeal is less about feature lists and more about what they don't have to think about. European payments are fragmented by design. Every country has its preferred methods, its own regulatory quirks, its own consumer habits. Mollie's job is to make that invisible. The numbers from 2024 reflect a company that has found its model. Revenue reached €214 million, up 28% year on year, with gross profit growing 30% to €115 million and the company returning to positive EBITDA for the first time since 2018. Mollie raised a total of $940 million in funding and was valued at $6.5 billion following its 2021 Series C led by Blackstone. The most significant recent development is the acquisition of GoCardless in December 2025 — bringing the UK-based direct debit specialist into the Mollie group and substantially expanding its recurring payments and bank transfer capabilities across Europe. Combined, the two companies cover a considerable share of European e-commerce payment infrastructure. Mollie is still headquartered in Amsterdam, with around 900 employees across offices in Ghent, London, Lisbon, Munich, Milan, Paris, and beyond.

Founded 2004

SumUp

🇩🇪 Germany

SumUp is a payments company built for the merchants traditional providers never bothered with. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, it sells low-cost card readers and point-of-sale hardware to small businesses — market traders, cafés, hairdressers, tradespeople — who could never justify the monthly fees, multi-year contracts, and cumbersome terminals that legacy processors demanded. The core proposition has barely changed since launch: buy a card reader outright for a modest one-off price, pay a small percentage per transaction, and sign nothing. That model has scaled a long way past its origins. SumUp now serves more than 4 million merchants across roughly 35 markets, employs around 4,000 people, and was valued at about €8 billion in a 2022 round led by Bain Capital. In 2024 it raised a €1.5 billion private credit facility led by Goldman Sachs, and it has been weighing a stock market listing that could value it as high as $15 billion. The more significant shift is that SumUp is no longer a card reader company. Through a run of acquisitions — Payleven, the e-commerce platform Shoplo, the core banking provider Paysolut, POS software firm Tiller, and the US loyalty startup Fivestars — it has assembled a full financial stack for micro-businesses: a business account and card, invoicing, an online store, loyalty tools, self-service kiosks, and SDKs for developers who want to embed card acceptance in their own products. The ambition is to be the only software a small merchant needs to run their business. That leaves SumUp in an unusual competitive position. On hardware and in-person payments it faces Square, Zettle, and Dojo; as a broader business platform it edges toward Stripe, Mollie, and Revolut Business. Its defensibility rests on the segment most of the industry finds too small to serve properly — the micro and nano merchants that make up the long tail of European commerce.

Founded 2012