Alternatives to MoonPay

Revolut

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Nik Storonsky grew up moving between Russia and France before landing in London as a derivatives trader. 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 net profit of £1.3 billion. The customer base grew to 68.3 million retail users — one in five working-age adults in Europe — plus 767,000 businesses. The company employs 12,200 people across more than 25 countries and was valued at $75 billion in a November 2025 secondary share sale, making it Europe's most valuable private technology company. The milestone that mattered most, though, arrived in March 2026: a full UK banking licence from the Prudential Regulation Authority, ending a three-year application process that had become the most-watched regulatory saga 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 company has also applied for a US banking charter and is expanding aggressively into Latin America, having opened its first bank outside Europe in Mexico. The original thesis — that banking could be cheaper, faster, and simpler — hasn't changed. The scale at which it's now being tested has.

Founded 2015

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

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

Bitpanda

🇦🇹 Austria

Bitpanda is a Vienna-based fintech that democratized crypto investing for European retail users who found traditional exchanges intimidating or inaccessible. The platform launched in 2014 as a Bitcoin marketplace and evolved into a multi-asset investment app that lets anyone buy fractions of crypto, stocks, metals, and commodities with a few taps on their phone. What sets Bitpanda apart is its aggressive focus on the everyday investor rather than crypto enthusiasts. The app strips away complexity, offers micro-investing (you can buy €1 worth of Bitcoin), and integrates savings automation through its Bitpanda Savings feature. It's become a household name in German-speaking Europe, with a clean mobile-first interface that appeals to younger savers who want exposure to alternative assets without the friction of traditional brokerages. Bitpanda operates across multiple business units: a consumer investment app, an institutional trading platform called Bitpanda Pro, and Bitpanda Elements, its white-label infrastructure play for financial institutions. The company expanded beyond crypto into traditional asset classes to capture a broader addressable market and hedge regulatory risk as European crypto rules tightened. Among European retail investment platforms, Bitpanda ranks as a serious contender—well-funded, profitable, and operating under tight regulatory scrutiny. It represents a shift in how Europeans think about alternative investments: not as speculative sidebets but as legitimate wealth-building tools accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

Founded 2014

GoCrypto

🇸🇮 Slovenia

GoCrypto enables merchants to accept crypto and digital payments at checkout.

Founded 2018

Checkout.com

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Checkout.com is a global payments infrastructure company that builds the plumbing beneath the surface of e-commerce. While most payment processors still operate like legacy banking rails, Checkout.com has constructed a single API that connects directly to card networks, acquiring banks, and alternative payment methods—eliminating the middlemen that slow everything down. The platform processes payments in over 150 currencies across 195 countries, handling everything from straightforward card transactions to complex multi-currency settlements for merchants operating at scale. What sets it apart in Europe and beyond is its refusal to be a typical payment gateway: instead of asking merchants to adapt to the network, Checkout.com adapts the network to the merchant. Founded in 2012 by Guillermo Gutiérrez García-Ceballos, the company has grown from a London-based startup into a critical piece of infrastructure for enterprises, fintechs, and marketplaces that need orchestration at the transaction level. It competes with traditional acquirers and modern payment platforms by combining the reliability of legacy banking with the speed and flexibility developers expect. In the fragmented European payments landscape, Checkout.com has become indispensable for companies that refuse to compromise on latency, coverage, or control. The company represents a fundamental shift in how payments should work: less about choosing between payment methods and more about making payments invisible.

Founded 2012

Qivalis

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Europe has spent years talking about digital sovereignty in finance. Qivalis is what happens when that conversation turns into a stablecoin. Based in Amsterdam, Qivalis is a bank-backed euro stablecoin initiative designed to bring regulated, euro-denominated money onto blockchain rails. The idea is simple but strategically loaded: create a digital euro asset that can move with the speed and programmability of crypto, while carrying the institutional trust of Europe’s banking sector. Its stablecoin is intended to be fully regulated, euro-backed, and built for secure digital payments and settlement. What makes Qivalis different is not just that it wants to issue a euro stablecoin. Plenty of crypto-native companies have tried to make euro stablecoins happen, with limited traction. Qivalis enters the market from the other side: not as a crypto startup trying to win over banks, but as a bank-led consortium trying to build a shared piece of European digital financial infrastructure. The consortium started with major European banks including ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, DekaBank, KBC, SEB, Raiffeisen Bank International and Banca Sella, with BNP Paribas later joining the group. Reuters reported that Qivalis was set up in Amsterdam and is applying for an Electronic Money Institution licence from De Nederlandsche Bank, with a planned launch in the second half of 2026. Since then, the project has become larger. Reuters reported on 20 May 2026 that the Qivalis consortium had expanded to 37 financial institutions across 15 countries, with additions including ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Sabadell, Bankinter, Bank of Ireland, Handelsbanken and Nordea. That scale matters because stablecoins are only useful if people and institutions actually use them. A euro stablecoin backed by one bank is a product. A euro stablecoin backed by dozens of banks starts to look more like infrastructure. Qivalis is aimed at a very specific problem: Europe does not want the future of digital money to be dominated only by dollar stablecoins. Today’s stablecoin market is heavily shaped by US dollar-denominated tokens such as USDT and USDC, issued by companies like Tether and Circle. The Financial Times reported that Qivalis is trying to create a euro-based alternative for use cases such as cross-border payments and atomic settlement, rather than replacing domestic payment systems. That distinction is important. Qivalis is not trying to become the next payment app for buying coffee in Amsterdam. It is closer to a wholesale and institutional digital money layer: a euro token that can be used for blockchain-based settlement, digital asset transactions, cross-border value movement and future tokenised finance. In that sense, Qivalis sits somewhere between banking infrastructure, stablecoins, payments and capital markets modernisation. The company is also part of the bigger MiCA story. Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation created a clearer framework for regulated crypto-assets and stablecoins, which gives bank-led initiatives a more credible path into the market. Qivalis is pursuing Dutch Central Bank authorisation as an Electronic Money Institution and has positioned itself as a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin issuer. Its leadership also signals the bridge it is trying to build. Reuters reported that Jan-Oliver Sell, formerly of Coinbase Germany, is CEO; ING digital asset lead Floris Lugt is CFO; and former NatWest chair Howard Davies is chair. That mix tells the story neatly: crypto market experience, bank digital asset expertise and old-school financial governance in one company. Qivalis feels different from most fintechs because it is not selling rebellion. It is not trying to make banks look outdated. It is trying to give banks a way to stay relevant in a financial system where tokenisation, blockchain settlement and programmable money are becoming harder to ignore. The pitch is not “move fast and break finance.” It is more European than that: move carefully, regulate properly, and build shared rails before someone else owns the market. The opportunity is clear. If tokenised assets, stablecoin settlement and on-chain financial markets keep growing, Europe will need a trusted euro-denominated settlement asset. A bank-backed stablecoin could help reduce reliance on dollar tokens, support faster cross-border settlement and give institutions a regulated way to use blockchain-based money without depending entirely on crypto-native issuers. The challenge is just as clear. Stablecoins need liquidity, distribution, trust and actual use cases. Euro stablecoins have historically struggled to gain meaningful adoption compared with dollar stablecoins. Qivalis will need to prove that banks can move fast enough, coordinate effectively and create a product that institutions actually prefer over existing alternatives. That is what makes Qivalis interesting. It is not just another stablecoin project. It is a test of whether European banks can build shared digital infrastructure before the market is fully captured by non-European players. Qivalis is Europe’s banking sector trying to answer a difficult question: if money is moving on-chain, who issues the euro that moves with it?

Founded 2025

Taurus

🇨🇭 Switzerland

Taurus provides digital asset custody, tokenization, and trading infrastructure for institutions.

Founded 2018

ClearBank

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

ClearBank provides cloud-based clearing, accounts, and embedded banking infrastructure.

Founded 2015

Payhip

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Payhip lets creators and small businesses sell directly to their audience without the usual gatekeeping. It's a all-in-one commerce platform that handles digital products, physical goods, subscriptions, and memberships—essentially a Shopify alternative built for creators who want simplicity and fair pricing. The platform lives in that sweet spot between marketplace and self-hosted store. You upload your product, set your price, share a link, and start selling. No approval process, no middleman deciding what you can or can't do. Payhip takes a percentage of each sale rather than charging upfront fees, which resonates with bootstrapped creators and solopreneurs who don't have predictable revenue yet. What sets Payhip apart is its lightness. While traditional payment processors demand integration work and setup headaches, Payhip is deliberately frictionless—you can be live within minutes. It also gives sellers control over their own affiliate networks and customer relationships, something most platforms charge extra for or restrict. In the crowded world of creator monetization tools, Payhip occupies the pragmatic middle: more powerful than a simple payment link, simpler than a full ecommerce platform, and designed specifically for people who want to sell without becoming a software engineer. It's quietly influential in how independent creators think about direct sales.

Founded 2010

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