Alternatives to Knab

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

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

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

Qonto

🇫🇷 France

Qonto is a French business banking platform for freelancers and SMEs — though, strictly speaking, it isn't a bank. It has operated since 2018 under a payment institution licence from France's ACPR, with customer funds safeguarded at Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, and only filed for a full French banking licence in July 2025. The distinction matters more than it sounds: that licence is the thing standing between Qonto and the lending, savings, and investment products it wants to sell directly. Founded in 2016 by Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi — Prot the son of Baudouin Prot, former chairman of BNP Paribas, which gives the challenger story a certain symmetry — the company set out to build the business account the founders wished they'd had. The product wraps a business account around the admin that surrounds it: invoicing, expense management, bookkeeping automation, cash flow forecasting, sub-accounts, and accounting integrations. Prot's own pitch is that customers save roughly two hours a week on paperwork. That has scaled into the leading position in European B2B banking. Qonto passed 600,000 customers across eight markets — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal — employs around 1,600 people, and has been profitable since 2023. It raised a $552 million Series D in 2022 at a $5 billion valuation and hasn't needed to raise since; profitability means even the banking licence push can be funded from what it already holds. Two acquisitions shaped it: German rival Penta in 2022, which brought 50,000 customers and a real German footprint, and accounting automation platform Regate in 2024, which opened up accountants and accounting firms as a new customer segment. The direction of travel is credit. Qonto has launched a Pay Later product, financing from €150 to €50,000, and added its first business credit card and overdraft facilities in January 2026 — all currently dependent on partnerships. A full banking licence would let it do that lending on its own account, which is the entire point of the application and the foundation of its stated goal of two million customers by 2030. Its competitive set is the European business banking cohort: Revolut Business, Tide, Holvi, Pennylane, and the incumbent banks it was built to route around.

Founded 2016

Blank

🇫🇷 France

Blank provides freelancers with a business account, insurance, and admin support.

Memo Bank

🇫🇷 France

Memo Bank is a European SME banking platform built for the realities of modern business. Rather than forcing entrepreneurs into legacy banking workflows, Memo gives small business owners a financial operating system designed around how they actually work—combining business accounts, payments, invoicing, and expense management in one interface. The platform handles the friction points that plague traditional business banking: slow payments, fragmented tooling, and compliance overhead that feels designed for a different era. What sets Memo apart is its architecture. Instead of bolting payment features onto a traditional account system, the company built integrated workflows from the ground up. You get real-time visibility into cash flow, automated invoice management, and seamless integrations with accounting software—the kind of coherence you find in consumer fintech but rarely in business banking. Multi-currency and cross-border payments work as smoothly as domestic transfers, stripping away the complexity that makes international business a headache for SMEs. Memo competes in a crowded space, but it's positioned differently from both legacy business banks and fragmented fintech stacks. It's not trying to be a wholesale replacement for every financial service a business might need. Instead, it's building the core banking layer that everything else should connect to—one that actually talks to how modern SMEs operate. In the broader European fintech landscape, Memo represents a maturing category: purpose-built business banking that treats SMEs as sophisticated customers rather than smaller versions of enterprises.

Founded 2017

Coverflex

🇵🇹 Portugal

Coverflex is rewriting how freelancers and gig workers access financial security in Europe. Instead of the traditional employment model, the platform bundles flexible work with genuine benefits—health insurance, pension contributions, and paid leave—creating a middle path between employment and total independence. The company essentially flips the script on gig economy precarity. Workers stay independent contractors but gain access to protections that were previously locked behind 9-to-5 employment. Employers get a simpler way to hire flexible talent without managing traditional payroll complexity. It's a fundamentally different architecture for modern work. Coverflex operates across multiple European markets and has built a B2B2C model where companies use the platform to offer benefits to their contractor workforce. The business combines insurance brokerage, financial services coordination, and workplace infrastructure into one interface. In a landscape where gig work remains fragmented and precarious, Coverflex sits at the intersection of fintech and HR tech, solving a genuine gap in how Europe's growing contingent workforce accesses security and stability.

Founded 2020

Silvr

🇫🇷 France

Silvr is a digital banking platform built specifically for the self-employed and freelance economy. The company targets creators, gig workers, and independent professionals who fall through the cracks of traditional banking—people running legitimate businesses but operating outside conventional employment structures. Rather than forcing them into generic business bank accounts designed for SMEs, Silvr offers tailored financial tools that actually reflect how modern independent work operates. The platform combines a business current account with integrated financial management features: invoicing, expense tracking, tax planning, and automated bookkeeping. Silvr handles the friction points that plague freelancers—irregular income patterns, complex tax obligations, cash flow volatility—by building visibility and automation directly into the banking layer. It's not a neobank trying to be all things to all people; it's purpose-built around the specific financial rhythm of self-employment. In a market dominated by legacy banks treating freelancers as afterthoughts and generic challenger banks treating them as just another customer segment, Silvr occupies a distinct position. It understands that the self-employed need different banking primitives, not just a prettier interface. The company sits at the intersection of business banking, fintech, and the creator economy—a segment the traditional sector has largely ignored. Silvr represents a broader fintech trend toward hyper-segmentation and behavioral specificity. Rather than chasing scale through mass-market appeal, it's building moat through deep product fit with an underserved but economically significant cohort.

Founded 2021

Paysera

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Paysera is a Lithuanian fintech company that has quietly built one of Europe's most comprehensive payment and banking platforms, serving millions of users across the continent. Rather than chasing hype, Paysera focuses on practical utility—combining payment processing, digital accounts, currency exchange, and invoicing tools into a single interface that works across borders and languages. The platform powers everything from freelancers managing invoices to SMEs handling payroll, while also offering consumer-facing services like multi-currency wallets and competitive exchange rates. What sets Paysera apart is its unglamorous pragmatism: it solves real friction in how Europeans move, spend, and manage money across different countries, without the startup theatrics. It's the kind of company that doesn't dominate headlines but has become indispensable infrastructure for a significant portion of the continent's digital economy. In the crowded European fintech landscape, where newer players chase consumer attention and legacy banks chase compliance, Paysera operates in the profitable middle—trusted by businesses and individuals who value reliability and cross-border simplicity over brand prestige.

Founded 2004

bnext

🇪🇸 Spain

bnext is a Spanish neobank built for the self-employed and small business owners who've outgrown traditional banking but don't need enterprise complexity. It strips away the bloat of legacy banks and focuses on what actually matters: a mobile-first account, competitive forex rates, and transparent fees with no surprise charges. The platform handles invoicing, expense tracking, and basic bookkeeping alongside core banking, positioning itself as a unified workspace rather than just another digital bank. Where established institutions still treat SMEs as afterthoughts, bnext treats them as the primary customer. It's designed for the freelancer checking balances between client calls and the startup founder who wants one dashboard instead of five browser tabs. The company has carved out real traction in Spain and increasingly across Europe, proving there's genuine demand for banking that actually understands how modern small business works.

Founded 2015

Indy

🇫🇷 France

Indy is a French fintech built for freelancers and self-employed workers who are tired of juggling accounting software, invoicing tools, and bank dashboards across a dozen different apps. The platform consolidates business banking, invoicing, expense tracking, and tax compliance into a single workspace designed specifically for French independent professionals and micro-entrepreneurs. Unlike traditional accounting software that feels built for accountants, Indy puts the solopreneur first—automating routine tasks like categorizing expenses and calculating quarterly tax estimates while keeping the interface clean and approachable. The company has become a go-to solution across France for freelancers managing both the creative and administrative sides of their business, from photographers to consultants to digital agencies. It's one of Europe's clearest examples of how fintech can solve a specific, underserved market by building exactly what that market actually needs rather than trying to be everything to everyone. In a landscape crowded with generic SME finance platforms, Indy's laser focus on French self-employed workers—and their particular regulatory requirements and pain points—has established it as a cultural fixture in the French freelance community.

Founded 2014