Alternatives to LHV

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

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

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.

Divilo

🇪🇸 Spain

Divilo is building the infrastructure for European businesses to manage their international payroll at scale. Rather than juggling multiple vendors across different countries—payroll processors here, compliance specialists there, currency brokers elsewhere—Divilo consolidates the entire stack into one operating system. The platform handles everything from local employment law compliance to multi-currency payments, tax filing, and benefits administration across the continent. For HR teams and CFOs wrestling with the complexity of expanding internationally, it's a rare case of genuine consolidation rather than another bolted-on layer. The European payroll market remains fragmented by design—local rules, tax codes, and banking infrastructure mean there's no true continental standard. Divilo is attacking this head-on with a unified API and dashboard that speaks to both the technical and operational reality of cross-border employment. It's the kind of infrastructure play that sounds boring until you realize how much operational friction it removes for companies thinking beyond their home market.

Founded 2021

Payhawk

🇧🇬 Bulgaria

Most companies still manage corporate spending the way they did a decade ago—expense reports, manual reconciliation, scattered receipts. Payhawk has built something radically simpler: a unified spending platform that gives finance teams complete visibility into every company transaction, from the moment it's authorized to the moment it's reconciled. The platform combines physical and virtual cards, automated expense management, and real-time spend controls in a single dashboard. What sets Payhawk apart in the crowded corporate finance space is its refusal to compromise on user experience. Employees aren't fighting clunky interfaces or wrestling with legacy systems. Instead, they get an intuitive mobile app that feels like personal fintech, while finance teams gain the analytical firepower to actually manage policy, catch fraud, and optimize spending patterns. The company treats visibility not as a nice-to-have but as the foundation of control. In Europe's SME and mid-market space, where most alternatives still rely on outdated card programs or disconnected software suites, Payhawk's integration of issuance, spend management, and analytics represents a meaningful shift. The company has quietly built something that enterprises have wanted for years: a spending platform that doesn't require compromise between employee experience and financial governance. For finance leaders tired of spreadsheets and reactive reporting, it's become the natural choice.

Founded 2019

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

Mitigram

🇸🇪 Sweden

Mitigram digitizes trade finance workflows for corporates and financial institutions.

Founded 2014

Solaris

🇩🇪 Germany

Solaris is a Berlin-based fintech infrastructure platform that lets financial institutions and fintechs launch their own digital banking products without building tech from scratch. Rather than wrestling with legacy core banking systems, clients plug into Solaris's cloud-native API layer to issue cards, manage accounts, and process payments at speed. The company operates in the shadows of most consumer apps—you won't see the Solaris logo in an app store—but its backbone runs through dozens of European fintechs, neobanks, and traditional financial institutions. Think of it as the plumbing that powers other people's banking ambitions. Solaris dominates a specific niche: the BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service) and embedded finance layer for Europe. While competitors like Thought Machine and Temenos chase enterprise banking overhauls, Solaris stays focused on the modern fintech workflow. Its modular design appeals to companies that need speed and flexibility, not a 10-year implementation project. In a market crowded with infrastructure plays, Solaris has become essential plumbing for European digital banking. It sits at the intersection of regulatory compliance, technical simplicity, and startup ambition—precisely where the next wave of European fintech is being built.

Founded 2015

Mambu

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Mambu is a cloud-native banking software platform that lets financial institutions and fintechs launch and operate lending and deposit products without building from scratch. Rather than forcing customers into rigid legacy systems, Mambu provides composable banking infrastructure—modular APIs and pre-built components that work together or stand alone, depending on what you actually need. The company sits at the intersection of two fintech realities: traditional banks are drowning in outdated core systems that can't keep pace with market demands, while new lenders and neobanks need speed without sacrificing compliance or scale. Mambu's approach is to be the operating system underneath, handling the heavy lifting of loan origination, deposit management, portfolio servicing, and regulatory reporting while letting clients focus on customer experience and product innovation. What makes Mambu different from other core banking platforms is its emphasis on velocity. Institutions deploy in weeks rather than years. The platform is genuinely modular—you can pick the lending module, the deposit module, or both, and layer in third-party services through APIs. This flexibility has resonated with everyone from African microfinance networks to European challenger banks to enterprise lenders managing complex credit products. Mambu is now a critical piece of infrastructure in the emerging markets fintech ecosystem, particularly across Africa and Asia, where it powers lending operations for hundreds of financial institutions. In Europe, it's carved out space among mid-market and challenger banks looking to avoid the capital expenditure and technical debt of legacy systems. The company represents a broader shift in fintech: away from end-to-end platforms that claim to do everything, toward specialized infrastructure that does one thing—backend financial operations—exceptionally well.

Founded 2011

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