Alternatives to Kevin

Tink

🇸🇪 Sweden

Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg didn't set out to build infrastructure. Tink started in Stockholm in 2012 as a consumer personal finance app — an attempt to give Swedish bank customers a cleaner view of their money across multiple accounts. It was a reasonable idea that ran into an unreasonable obstacle: getting reliable, consistent data out of European banks was extraordinarily hard. The technical problem turned out to be more interesting than the consumer product. In 2018 they pivoted, shifted focus entirely to the B2B layer, and started selling the very infrastructure they'd been forced to build for themselves. That pivot proved prescient. The EU's PSD2 directive, which came into full effect in 2019, legally required banks to open their data to authorised third parties — creating the regulatory foundation that open banking platforms needed to operate at scale. Tink had spent years building exactly those bank connections. When the regulation arrived, the company was ready. The platform Kjellén and Hedberg built connects to more than 3,400 banks and financial institutions across Europe, reaching over 250 million bank customers. Through a single API integration, banks, fintechs, and merchants can access aggregated account data, initiate payments directly from customer bank accounts, verify account ownership, and enrich transaction data — without maintaining their own connections to hundreds of separate banking systems with different technical standards and update schedules. Clients include Klarna, PayPal, NatWest, ABN AMRO, and BNP Paribas Fortis. In March 2022, Visa completed the acquisition of Tink for €1.8 billion — one of the largest European fintech acquisitions of that year, and a clear signal of how seriously the global payments industry had come to take open banking infrastructure. Visa's strategic rationale was straightforward: it had failed to acquire Plaid, the US equivalent, after an antitrust challenge, and needed a European open banking capability. Tink gave it 500 employees, 18 European markets, and relationships with over 300 banks and fintechs built over a decade. The founders stayed on as CEO and CTO through the transition, continuing to run Tink as a standalone Visa subsidiary from Stockholm. Both departed in 2025 — Kjellén and Hedberg announced they were building Freda, a new AI-driven legal and compliance technology startup, with the pair describing Tink as "now in better hands than ever." Francois Tornier, Visa's VP of Open Banking, took over as CEO. The product roadmap has continued under Visa ownership, including a 2024 expansion of Tink's open banking platform into the US market.

Founded 2012

Kontomatik

🇵🇱 Poland

Kontomatik provides open banking data and credit decisioning tools.

Founded 2009

Token.io

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Token.io provides account-to-account payment infrastructure for open banking use cases.

Abound

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Abound uses open banking data to make consumer lending decisions more personal.

Fintonic

🇪🇸 Spain

Fintonic is a Spanish fintech that has spent the better part of a decade helping everyday Europeans understand what they're actually spending money on. Rather than reinvent banking from scratch, it acts as a layer on top of your existing accounts—aggregating transactions, categorizing expenses, and surfacing insights that most banks still bury in PDF statements. The app feels less like financial software and more like a personal finance companion that speaks plain language. You link your bank accounts, and Fintonic does the unglamorous work: tracking subscriptions you forgot about, highlighting spending patterns, flagging unusual transactions. It's deliberately unglamorous work, because the real value sits in simplicity. What sets Fintonic apart in a crowded personal finance space is its focus on the European user. The platform understands local banking infrastructure, multi-currency households, and the specific pain points of cross-border living. It's not trying to be your investment platform or your savings app or your lending provider—it's trying to be the one thing most people actually need: clarity on money that's already moving. For a generation that finds traditional banking UX infuriating, Fintonic occupies the pragmatic middle ground: minimal, useful, and genuinely designed for how Europeans actually manage money.

Founded 2011

Nexi

🇮🇹 Italy

Nexi is Italy's largest payment services operator, controlling the infrastructure that moves money across the country's retail and corporate sectors. Founded in 2013 through a merger of two major Italian payment processors, it manages card transactions, merchant acquiring, and digital payment rails for banks, retailers, and businesses across Europe. The company operates across the full payments stack—from traditional POS terminals and card networks to modern API-based solutions and instant payment systems. Unlike most fintech startups, Nexi doesn't target consumers directly. Instead, it powers the payment backbone for Italian and European financial institutions and retailers, processing tens of billions in transactions annually. Its business model sits at the intersection of traditional payment infrastructure and modern open banking, positioning it as a critical node in Europe's shift toward real-time payments and embedded finance. Nexi's role is unglamorous but essential: it's the plumbing that makes modern commerce work, handling everything from contactless cards to mobile wallets to cross-border transfers. In the broader European fintech landscape, it represents the "boring" but profitable core—the infrastructure layer that fintechs themselves depend on to function.

Founded 2013

Yapily

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Yapily sits at the intersection of open banking and embedded finance, building the plumbing that lets fintech companies and enterprises tap into banking data and payments without reinventing the wheel. Founded in 2016, the London-based company operates as an API infrastructure layer—connecting to banks across Europe and beyond to unlock account information, payment initiation, and consent management at scale. What makes Yapily different is how it abstracts away the complexity of working with hundreds of banks and their inconsistent technical standards. Rather than forcing developers to build individual integrations for each bank's API, Yapily provides a unified interface that normalizes everything. It's the translator between your app and the messy reality of legacy banking infrastructure. The company operates in the B2B2C space, partnering with fintechs, neobanks, and enterprise software providers who need banking connectivity but lack the resources to build it themselves. Their customer base spans lending platforms, wealth apps, accounting software, and payment orchestration layers—essentially anyone whose product benefits from real-time access to customer bank accounts or the ability to initiate payments. Yapily's positioning is deliberately unsexy: they're infrastructure, not consumer-facing. But that's precisely the point. In a landscape crowded with consumer fintechs chasing headlines, Yapily has built a quiet, profitable business serving the builders themselves. They're to open banking what Stripe is to payments—the backbone that lets innovation happen faster.

Founded 2016

Moneyhub

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Open banking's promise — that financial data, properly used, can help people make better decisions — has been articulated by hundreds of companies. Moneyhub has spent longer than most actually delivering it. Founded in Bristol in 2014, it built one of the UK's first and most comprehensive open banking platforms, aggregating financial accounts, pension data, and property values into a unified financial picture that gives users — and the institutions serving them — a genuinely complete view of financial health. Its B2B platform powers the open banking and financial wellness features of major UK employers, financial advice firms, and pension providers, white-labelling its data aggregation and analytics capabilities under their brands. The pensions integration is particularly significant — Moneyhub connects to pension providers alongside bank accounts, giving users visibility into their retirement savings alongside their current financial position. That breadth of financial data coverage — beyond the current account focus of most open banking platforms — is a genuine differentiator. In the UK open banking ecosystem, where the FCA's consumer duty requirements are pushing financial institutions to demonstrate they understand their customers' broader financial circumstances, Moneyhub's comprehensive data view is becoming infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.

Founded 2014

Belvo

🇪🇸 Spain

Belvo is a fintech infrastructure company that lets developers tap into Latin American banking data without building a single integration. The platform connects to thousands of banks and financial institutions across Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, unlocking account balances, transaction histories, and identity information through a single API. Rather than forcing developers to chase down fragmented banking systems, Belvo standardizes chaotic regional financial infrastructure into clean, predictable data flows. Its core insight is simple: Latin American fintech is drowning in bank connectivity work when it should be building products. Belvo solves that. The platform serves fintechs, neobanks, and traditional financial institutions looking to modernize lending decisions, open banking integrations, and embedded finance experiences. Think of it as the connective tissue between fractured regional banking systems and the apps that need to run on top of them. By abstracting away the complexity of working with hundreds of different bank APIs and connection methods, Belvo has become the standard for financial data aggregation in a region where banking infrastructure is anything but standardized. It's the kind of boring-but-essential infrastructure that powers smarter lending, faster onboarding, and new financial products across Latin America.

Founded 2019

Swan

🇫🇷 France

Swan is reshaping how European businesses handle payments by offering a modern, developer-friendly infrastructure layer that sits between companies and the complexity of traditional banking rails. Rather than forcing startups and established firms to navigate fragmented payment ecosystems, Swan bundles together payment processing, banking APIs, and compliance tooling into a single, coherent platform. The company targets mid-market and enterprise customers—think e-commerce platforms, SaaS businesses, and financial services—who need to embed payments into their core operations without hiring a dedicated payments team. Swan's core strength lies in its ability to strip away legacy banking friction: it handles card processing, instant payments, payouts, and cross-border transfers through a unified API, while managing the regulatory headaches that usually consume engineering bandwidth. In a European landscape crowded with payment gateways and banking APIs, Swan distinguishes itself through developer experience and architectural clarity. Where competitors often bolt together disparate services, Swan presents a genuinely integrated stack—one codebase, one dashboard, one billing model. The company serves as both a payments operator and a bridge to traditional banking, making it particularly valuable for businesses scaling beyond their first million transactions. Swan represents a broader maturation in European fintech infrastructure: the shift from "we'll process your payments" to "we'll become your payments backbone," enabling a generation of companies to focus on their core product rather than payment plumbing.

Founded 2019

TrueLayer

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

TrueLayer is a payments and open banking infrastructure platform that lets fintech companies, payment processors, and traditional banks access real-time financial data and initiate payments directly from consumer bank accounts across Europe. Rather than building APIs from scratch or waiting months for bank integrations, developers plug into TrueLayer's unified network and immediately get access to payment initiation, account aggregation, and transaction data from thousands of financial institutions. The company operates as a critical middleware layer in European fintech. While most payment infrastructure still relies on cards or legacy rails, TrueLayer routes transactions through bank-grade open banking rails, making transfers faster, cheaper, and less friction-heavy. Its API-first approach means a startup launching in five countries gets the same clean integration experience as an enterprise player. In the competitive open banking space, TrueLayer stands out through breadth of coverage and developer experience. The platform supports payments in 17+ European countries and has built integrations with hundreds of banks—not through partnerships alone, but through technical depth in handling regional quirks and regulatory complexity. Its customer base spans neobanks like Wise and Revolut, major payment processors, and traditional banks replatforming their operations. TrueLayer essentially democratized access to Europe's banking infrastructure at a moment when open banking regulations made that access possible but still technically demanding. For any fintech building on the continent, it's become a foundational piece of modern payment architecture.

Founded 2016

OpenWrks

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

OpenWrks was the UK's first FCA regulated AIS Open Banking platform. In 2020 OpenWrks was acquired by Tink. Credit decisions have historically been made on backward-looking data — credit files that reflect what happened years ago rather than what a person's financial life looks like today. OpenWrks was founded in London in 2017 to change that with open banking data. Its platform uses transaction data from bank accounts to generate real-time financial insights — income verification, affordability assessments, and cash flow analytics — that lenders, debt advisors, and financial services companies can use to make better decisions about the people they serve. The focus on affordability and debt support is deliberate — OpenWrks has built particular depth in the debt advice sector, providing tools that help debt charities and money guidance services understand their clients' financial situations with precision and speed that paper-based assessments cannot match. Its work with the Money and Pensions Service and other UK debt support organisations reflects a commitment to using open banking data for financial inclusion rather than purely commercial lending optimisation. In the open banking ecosystem, where most data applications focus on acquisition and credit origination, OpenWrks' orientation toward debt support and financial wellbeing is a distinctive positioning that has built genuine trust with the organisations that serve financially vulnerable people.

Founded 2017