Alternatives to Goin

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

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

Monzo

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

The founding team that built Monzo had all worked together before — at Starling Bank, another challenger startup that didn't survive its internal conflicts. Tom Blomfield, Gary Dolman, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, and Paul Rippon left together in 2015 and started again. The product was initially a prepaid card — a coral-coloured piece of plastic that became one of the most recognisable objects in British fintech — before becoming a fully licensed current account in 2017. The early community was unusual for a bank: public engineering blogs, user forums, beta programmes, and a 2016 crowdfunding round that raised £1 million in 96 seconds, a world record. People felt ownership of the product in a way no high street bank had ever achieved, and that emotional connection became a durable competitive advantage. A decade on, the results have caught up with the mythology. For the year to March 2026, Monzo reported revenue of £1.71 billion, up 39%, with gross profit crossing £1 billion for the first time and a third consecutive year in the black — statutory pre-tax profit of £87.3 million, up 44%, or £172.6 million adjusted for restructuring charges and a roughly £21 million FCA fine over historical financial-crime control failings. The bank added a record three million customers to reach 15.2 million — one in five UK adults — with deposits up 55% to £25.7 billion, 1.6 million paying subscribers, and business banking growing 45% to 905,000 customers and 14% of revenue. Four separate income streams — current account balances, borrowing, payments, and wealth — each now clear £300 million. Half of active customers use Monzo as their primary bank, which shows up in the metric that anchors every valuation conversation: revenue per active personal customer of £167, against Revolut's £66. The gap is the difference between being someone's bank and being their travel card. Leadership and strategy both turned over during the year. Diana Layfield, a former Google executive, took over as CEO in February 2026 following TS Anil's departure — a transition shaped in part by board tensions over IPO venue and the company's UK concentration. Her first significant moves were decisive: Monzo closed its US operations entirely, and redirected the international ambition at Europe, where it secured a banking licence from the Central Bank of Ireland, launched in Ireland to a 100,000-person waitlist, and named Spain as the next market. The acquisition of digital mortgage broker Habito completed on 1 April 2026, giving the bank a capital-efficient route into mortgages — a product more than 550,000 customers were already tracking in the app. Costs rose with the ambition: the cost-to-income ratio ticked up to 74% as hiring and marketing accelerated. Monzo remains private, valued at approximately $5.9 billion in its 2024 secondary sale, and Layfield has told the FT she is "not in a hurry" to list. The strategic bet of this chapter is clear and genuinely contestable: that Monzo's deep-relationship, primary-bank model — expensive to build, lucrative per customer — can be exported to European markets where Revolut arrived a decade earlier with the opposite playbook. The UK numbers say the model works. Europe will say whether it travels.

Founded 2015

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

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

Starling Bank

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Starling is a UK digital bank offering personal and business current accounts entirely through a mobile app, with no branches. Founded in January 2014 by Anne Boden, a former Allied Irish Banks COO, it secured a full UK banking licence in 2016 — a distinction that matters more than it sounds. Unlike neobanks that operate on a partner institution's licence, Starling is a bank in its own right, regulated by the FCA and PRA, with deposits FSCS-protected. It also built its own core banking technology rather than licensing someone else's, and that decision turned out to have a second act. Engine by Starling packages that technology as software-as-a-service and sells it to other banks: Salt Bank in Romania and AMP Bank in Australia were the first clients live on the platform, and Starling is now pushing Engine into North America and the Middle East, targeting what CEO Raman Bhatia has called a £100 billion addressable market. For a bank whose retail footprint stops at the UK border, Engine is the international growth story — and the reason Starling turns up in Banking-as-a-Service conversations as often as digital banking ones. The core bank remains strong but is no longer on a simple upward curve. Starling reported its fifth consecutive profitable year in 2026, with pre-tax profit of roughly £217 million on £887 million of revenue, serving around 3.5 million personal and business customers, and it has been named Which? Banking Brand of the Year three years running. But that result marked a second straight annual decline, after a 26% profit drop the year before, driven by provisions for pandemic-era Bounce Back Loan issues and a regulatory penalty. That penalty is the part most profiles leave out. In October 2024 the FCA fined Starling £29 million over anti-money laundering and sanctions screening failures, finding the bank had opened more than 54,000 accounts for high-risk customers in breach of an agreed restriction, and that its screening system had been checking customers against only a fraction of the UK sanctions list since 2017. Starling accepted the findings, apologised, and has invested heavily in remediation — but the episode illustrates the defining challenge of the challenger-bank model: compliance infrastructure that struggles to keep pace with customer growth. Anne Boden stepped down as CEO in 2023 and left the board in 2024. Raman Bhatia, formerly CEO of OVO and head of HSBC's UK and European digital bank, took over in 2024 and has spent his tenure working through the legacy issues while repositioning the company's growth story around Engine. The bank dropped "Bank" from its name in a September 2025 rebrand.

Founded 2014

Pockit

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Every UK neobank claims to serve people the banks ignore. Pockit actually built its business there. Founded by Virraj Jatania in 2014 as a prepaid card, it grew into a digital account for the roughly 17.5 million UK adults underserved by mainstream banking — people with thin credit files, irregular incomes, or histories that fail high-street onboarding. The product set follows the customer: a simple account and card, cross-border transfers, early wage access, credit building, and cashback — priced as a utility rather than a lifestyle brand. It is the unfashionable end of consumer fintech, and Pockit's bet has always been that unfashionable segments are where loyalty and margins survive, precisely because nobody else is competing for them. The company also carries a scar that shaped it: in 2020, when the FCA froze Wirecard Card Solutions during the Wirecard collapse, Pockit customers were locked out of their money for days — a formative lesson in the risks of renting critical infrastructure. The transformational move came in October 2024, when Pockit acquired Monese — the pan-European money app founded by Estonian entrepreneur Norris Koppel in 2015 — for a reported £15 million. The price is the story: Monese had raised more than $200 million from investors including HSBC, Kinnevik, and PayPal, and HSBC had already written its stake down to zero. What was a wipeout for Monese's cap table was a coup for Pockit's: the combined group serves roughly three million customers, generates around £30 million in annual revenue, and processes about £5 billion in transactions a year. Just as valuable, Monese brought e-money and consumer credit licences that cut Pockit's transaction costs and open the path to lending products for a customer base otherwise pushed toward high-cost credit — the loan-shark alternative Jatania cites as the mission's sharpest edge. Monese's B2B platform, XYB, was excluded from the deal. Pockit is backed by Puma Growth Partners and Maven Capital, with a cap table that includes Sir Alex Ferguson, private equity veteran Jon Moulton, and the UK's Future Fund; it raised £10 million in growth funding in 2024 ahead of the acquisition. The integration has been real — headcount stands around 52 after consolidation, against the 100 Monese staff who joined at completion. Jatania's public thesis is that UK fintech is entering a consolidation phase, and Pockit is the proof-of-concept: while Monzo and Revolut fight for the mass market at nine-figure marketing budgets, Pockit is quietly rolling up the segment beneath them — buying at distressed prices the customers that cost its rivals £50 a head to acquire. Whether a low-margin customer base can support a lending business profitably is the open question; the licences to find out are now in hand.

Founded 2015

Tinaba

🇮🇹 Italy

Tinaba offers mobile banking, payments, and investment services in Italy.

LHV

🇪🇪 Estonia

LHV has the distinction of being both Estonia's largest domestic bank and one of the most important banking infrastructure providers in European fintech. Founded in Tallinn in 1999 — making it ancient by Estonian standards in a country whose digital infrastructure is itself only a few decades old — LHV grew from an investment firm into a full retail bank, navigating Estonia's evolution from post-Soviet transition economy to digital society more successfully than many of its peers. The bank serves Estonian retail and business customers across the full range of banking products, with particular strength in investment services that reflects its origins as a brokerage. Beyond its domestic banking business, LHV has built a Pan-European operation providing banking services to fintechs — issuing accounts, IBANs, and payment infrastructure to many of the UK and European fintechs that needed banking partnerships to operate compliantly. The fintech banking business has made LHV one of the most important behind-the-scenes infrastructure providers in European fintech, even if most of the consumer-facing companies that rely on it never mention LHV publicly. In the European banking landscape, LHV represents the unusual combination of small national bank and Pan-European fintech enabler — a position that few institutions have managed to occupy.

Founded 1999

BUUT

🇳🇱 Netherlands

BUUT is part of a new wave of European neobanks rethinking what everyday banking should feel like—this time with a specific audience in mind: young users aged 10 to 16. Instead of overwhelming first-time users with complex features, it leans into simplicity, guidance, and a smoother introduction to managing money. At its core, BUUT is designed to make financial habits easy to build early on. The app focuses on clean design, intuitive navigation, and a user experience that feels natural from the start. Spending, saving, and tracking money are presented in a way that’s easy to understand—less like dealing with a bank, and more like using a well-designed everyday app. There’s also a shift in tone compared to traditional banking. BUUT speaks to a younger audience without talking down to them. It removes the friction and confusion that often come with financial tools, replacing it with clarity and a sense of control. The aim isn’t to teach finance through complexity, but to make good habits feel almost automatic. What sets BUUT apart is its restraint. While many fintech apps compete to become all-in-one financial platforms, BUUT keeps things focused. It prioritizes usability and trust—especially important when users are just starting to interact with money on their own. That makes it particularly relevant for a new generation growing up fully digital. BUUT fits naturally into their daily lives, offering a first step into financial independence without the intimidation factor. In a crowded European fintech landscape, BUUT stands out by doing less, but doing it thoughtfully—helping younger users build confidence with money from the very beginning.

Founded 2025

Ritmo

🇪🇸 Spain

Ritmo is a neobank built specifically for the gig economy—the millions of freelancers, contractors, and self-employed workers across Europe who operate outside traditional employment structures. Instead of forcing gig workers into standard business banking products, Ritmo designed from the ground up to understand the rhythms of irregular income, multiple clients, and the administrative burden that comes with self-employment. The platform combines a business checking account with invoicing, expense tracking, and tax preparation tools, removing the friction between earning money and managing it. You get real-time visibility into cash flow, automated categorization of business expenses, and direct integration with tax authorities—so when it's time to file, the data is already organized. What sets Ritmo apart isn't just its feature set. Most fintech players either chase the consumer market or build enterprise solutions for corporations. Ritmo recognized a gap: gig workers are economically significant but underserved by both traditional banks and most neobanks. The company speaks their language, understands their cash flow volatility, and builds products that actually reflect how they work. In the broader European fintech landscape, Ritmo represents a growing trend of vertical-specific banking platforms. Rather than being all things to all people, it's solving a precise problem for a rapidly growing demographic. For the gig worker tired of explaining variable income to a bank manager or juggling multiple apps, Ritmo is the kind of focused, no-nonsense solution that defines modern fintech at its best.

Founded 2021