Alternatives to Kriya

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

Fagura

🇷🇴 Romania

Fagura is a B2B wholesale marketplace that lets retailers and resellers source products directly from manufacturers across Europe. Rather than hunting through scattered suppliers or dealing with traditional wholesale distribution, users navigate a single platform to compare prices, find new suppliers, and place orders. The model cuts out the middleman, giving small retailers the margins they need to compete on price while manufacturers reach customers they'd otherwise struggle to find. What makes Fagura stand out in the broader fintech landscape is its embedded finance layer—the company operates a working capital financing facility that lets buyers pay for inventory purchases over time, turning what would otherwise be a cash-flow bottleneck into a growth lever. This isn't fintech as a standalone product; it's fintech woven into the nuts and bolts of how small business inventory gets funded. Fagura has built something rare: a marketplace where financial services don't just sit on top, they're baked into the commercial mechanics. For SMEs across Europe struggling to finance seasonal stock or scale quickly, Fagura represents a different way to structure working capital—accessible, automatic, and tied directly to real purchasing behavior.

Founded 2019

Fabrick

🇮🇹 Italy

Fabrick operates in the unglamorous but essential corner of fintech where plumbing meets innovation. The Italian firm builds the digital infrastructure that lets banks, fintechs, and non-financial companies offer financial services without building everything from scratch. It's Banking-as-a-Service for a continent that still runs on legacy rails, but Fabrick is quietly rewiring how money moves across borders and between accounts. The company offers a full stack of APIs and platforms covering payments, accounts, lending, and open banking connectivity. Rather than forcing clients into rigid templates, Fabrick positions itself as a modular toolbox: plug in what you need, leave out what you don't. This flexibility appeals to enterprises tired of one-size-fits-all solutions and startups wanting to launch financial products without the regulatory headache of building a bank license from scratch. In a European fintech landscape dominated by consumer-facing rebels, Fabrick is the B2B backbone nobody talks about at conferences but everyone quietly depends on. It competes by being boring in all the right ways—reliable, compliant, and deep enough in the weeds to handle edge cases that make other platforms crumble. The company has steadily expanded across Europe, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for a generation of embedded finance plays.

Founded 2014

finleap

🇩🇪 Germany

finleap is Berlin's answer to a question the European fintech scene keeps asking: how do you build world-class financial companies at scale? Rather than chase unicorn valuations, finleap builds them. The holding company operates as a fintech factory, incubating and scaling financial startups from day one with institutional backing, operational expertise, and a network that spans regulators, banks, and investors across the continent. What sets finleap apart is the architecture itself. It's not an accelerator or a VC fund—it's a purpose-built engine for creating and nurturing fintech companies. Each portfolio company gets access to finleap's infrastructure, compliance playbooks, and go-to-market templates, which compresses timelines and eliminates the friction that typically derails early-stage fintechs. The model works: companies like Wayfair-backed Finn, B2B payments platform Foxpay, and lending marketplace Evala have all emerged from the finleap stable. Internally, finleap operates across payments, lending, wealth, and embedded finance—categories where the European market remains genuinely underpenetrated compared to the US. The company's thesis is straightforward: identify white space in financial services, build products faster than traditional banks can move, and create defensible market positions through technology and user experience. It's less about disruption theater and more about pragmatic value creation. Finleap sits at an interesting intersection in the European fintech landscape: large enough to command resources and regulatory relationships, independent enough to move quickly, and structured in a way that lets founders maintain autonomy while tapping institutional muscle. For a continent that produces good fintech companies but struggles with scaling, finleap represents a new playbook.

Founded 2014

Defacto

🇫🇷 France

Defacto is a supply chain financing platform built for the digital age, targeting the gap between small suppliers and the large enterprises that depend on them. Rather than waiting 30, 60, or 90 days for payment, suppliers can access capital immediately based on their invoices and purchase orders—turning cash flow from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. The platform connects directly to procurement systems, automating the approval and funding process with minimal friction. What sets Defacto apart is its focus on transparency and speed. Traditional supply chain finance has always been opaque, expensive, and slow. Defacto strips that away, offering suppliers a straightforward alternative to bank loans or factoring arrangements that drain margins. For corporates, it becomes a working capital tool that improves supplier relationships while unlocking liquidity across the supply chain. The company operates in an increasingly crowded space, but its emphasis on automation and real-time data integration—pulling directly from ERP and procurement systems—gives it operational efficiency competitors struggle to match. In the broader fintech landscape, Defacto represents a shift toward embedded finance solutions that solve real business problems rather than chasing consumer attention. It's helping reshape how money flows through global supply chains, one invoice at a time.

Founded 2018

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

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

Biller

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Biller provides B2B buy-now-pay-later and invoice payment solutions.

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

Narvi

🇫🇮 Finland

Narvi is a European fintech that simplifies embedded lending for e-commerce and marketplace platforms. Rather than forcing merchants to build lending infrastructure from scratch, Narvi handles the entire loan lifecycle—from origination through servicing—as a white-label API that integrates directly into checkout flows. The company targets online retailers and marketplace operators who want to offer buy-now-pay-later and installment credit without the operational overhead of underwriting, collections, or compliance. Narvi handles credit decisions using proprietary scoring models and manages all regulatory requirements, while merchants simply embed a widget and capture incremental revenue. In a market crowded with point-solution BNPL providers, Narvi positions itself as a full-stack lending partner rather than a payment mode. The company serves merchants across Europe and has built integrations with major e-commerce platforms, making it simpler for smaller retailers to compete with well-funded rivals on financing offerings. Narvi represents a growing class of embedded finance infrastructure plays—companies enabling non-financial businesses to offer financial products without becoming financial institutions themselves. Its role is to abstract complexity and regulatory burden, letting merchants focus on customer experience and growth.

Founded 2020

Krea

🇸🇪 Sweden

Krea helps Swedish businesses compare and access financing offers.