Alternatives to Northmill

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

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

Inbank

🇪🇪 Estonia

Specialised banking for consumer credit — focused on lending products distributed through merchant partnerships rather than building general-purpose retail banking — is a model with deeper European roots than the venture-backed BNPL conversation suggests. Inbank was founded in Tallinn in 2011 as a specialist lender focused on point-of-sale consumer credit, partnering with retailers across Estonia and the broader Baltic and Central European region to offer instalment finance at the moment of purchase. The company received a full Estonian banking licence and has built operations across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic, expanding from a domestic specialist into a Pan-European consumer finance bank. Inbank is publicly listed on the Nasdaq Tallinn exchange — one of the few publicly traded Baltic fintechs — giving it both the regulatory standing of a licensed bank and the funding access of a public company. Its product range covers point-of-sale finance, BNPL, and consumer deposit products, with merchant partnerships across automotive, electronics, home improvement, and other categories where consumers commonly finance purchases. In the European specialist consumer banking landscape, Inbank represents one of the more successful examples of a focused operator scaling across borders while maintaining the operational discipline of a regulated bank.

Founded 2011

Younited

🇫🇷 France

Younited provides instant credit and embedded lending across Europe.

Founded 2009

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

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

Enity

🇩🇪 Germany

Enity sits at the intersection of embedded finance and merchant payments, letting businesses embed lending directly into their checkout flows. Rather than forcing customers to apply for credit elsewhere, Enity's API lets companies offer point-of-sale financing instantly—think Buy Now, Pay Later but more flexible and customizable. The platform handles underwriting, decisioning, and funding, meaning merchants don't carry the credit risk themselves. It's the kind of infrastructure that makes sense as e-commerce and marketplaces mature beyond simple transaction processing. Enity works across Europe, tapping into fragmented credit markets where unified APIs for embedded finance remain rare. The company positions itself against both traditional BNPL providers—which often dictate terms to merchants—and against the friction of integrating multiple lenders. Its real edge is speed and developer experience: getting live takes days, not months. For merchants handling high-value transactions or B2B sales, Enity's underwriting engine and multi-lender orchestration solve a genuine pain point. The rise of embedded lending means platforms like this will become table stakes for any serious commerce infrastructure player.

Founded 2020

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

Monzo

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

The founding team that built Monzo had all worked together before — at Starling Bank, another challenger bank startup that didn't survive its internal conflicts. Tom Blomfield, Gary Dolman, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, and Paul Rippon left Starling together in 2015 and started again. The product they built was initially a prepaid card — a coral-coloured piece of plastic that became one of the most recognisable objects in British fintech — before becoming a fully licensed current account in 2017. The early user community was unusual for a bank. Monzo ran community forums, published public blog posts about its engineering decisions, and invited customers into beta programmes for new features. When it broke the world record for the fastest crowdfunding raise in 2016 — £1 million in 96 seconds — it wasn't just raising money; it was building an identity. People felt ownership of the product in a way that no high street bank had ever managed to create. That emotional connection became a genuine competitive advantage. The product has matured considerably since then. Monzo now offers current accounts, joint accounts, savings pots, personal loans, overdrafts, and investment products, all wrapped in the real-time notification experience and transaction categorisation that made its early reputation. Revenue reached £1.23 billion in 2024, up 40% year on year, with net income of £95 million — the second consecutive year of profitability after years of growth-first losses. The customer base reached 12.1 million by end of 2024, making Monzo the UK's largest digital bank by customer count. Customer deposits stood at £16.6 billion. The business is still private — the much-discussed IPO has not yet happened, and internal disagreements about where to list (the former CEO TS Anil favoured the US, the board preferred London) contributed to Anil's departure in October 2025. Diana Layfield took over as CEO with a mandate focused on international expansion before any public listing. The company is valued at approximately $5.9 billion following a 2024 secondary sale backed by Alphabet's GIC and StepStone. In December 2025 Monzo announced it had agreed to acquire Habito, the digital mortgage broker, pending regulatory approval — a move that extends the product into one of the last major financial products it didn't yet offer. With 3,821 employees and a loan book growing rapidly, Monzo has evolved from a prepaid card experiment into a bank with genuine scale and a growing claim on being the primary financial account for a generation of UK consumers.

Founded 2015

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

Lendable

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Lendable sits at the intersection of institutional finance and algorithmic credit. It's a platform that connects alternative lenders—think peer-to-peer platforms, fintechs, and non-bank lenders—with institutional capital markets. Rather than originating loans itself, Lendable acts as a market infrastructure layer, securitizing consumer and SME loan portfolios and selling them to institutional investors hungry for yield in an era of low rates. The company essentially democratized access to capital markets for non-traditional lenders. Before Lendable, a mid-sized P2P lender or online SME lender couldn't easily tap into the deep-pocketed institutional buyers that banks routinely access. Lendable changed that by building the plumbing—origination APIs, portfolio management tools, and securitization infrastructure—that lets alternative lenders scale without warehousing risk on their own balance sheets. In the European fintech landscape, Lendable represents a specific but growing category: the infrastructure play that enables other fintechs to thrive. It's not a consumer app; it's the backbone that lets consumer-facing lenders actually fund their ambitions. The platform has processed billions in loan assets and works with some of Europe's most recognizable fintech names. Lendable's role in the broader ecosystem is that of a bridge—connecting the new world of distributed lending with the old world of institutional capital. It's quietly important infrastructure, the kind of thing that doesn't grab headlines but fundamentally reshapes how credit flows.

Founded 2013