Alternatives to Salus Alpha Direct

Revolut

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Nik Storonsky was born in Dolgoprudny, Russia, and moved to London in 2006 to work as an equity derivatives trader, first at Lehman Brothers and later at Credit Suisse. 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 pre-tax profit rising 57% to £1.7 billion. The customer base grew to 68.3 million retail users, plus 767,000 businesses. The company employs more than 12,000 people and operates in more than 40 markets, 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 five-year application process that had become one of the most-watched regulatory sagas 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

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

Artemundi

🇩🇪 Germany

Artemundi is an alternative asset manager built for the modern wealth ecosystem. Rather than chasing traditional markets, the firm specializes in emerging market debt, private equity, and distressed assets—seeking returns where conventional investors see opacity. It's positioned at the intersection of hedge fund sophistication and institutional rigor, attracting wealth managers and sophisticated investors who understand that real returns often live outside the mainstream. The company runs multiple investment vehicles targeting different risk appetites and timeframes, each managed with the discipline of a tier-one institutional shop. Their approach combines deep emerging market expertise with operational rigor, allowing them to navigate complexity that smaller competitors cannot. This isn't retail wealth management repackaged; it's institutional-grade alternative investing for those who can access it. In the European wealth tech landscape, Artemundi represents the alternative asset class gatekeepers—firms that manage substantial capital across non-traditional strategies. While the fintech world obsesses over fractional shares and gamified trading, Artemundi operates in the space where serious capital allocation happens. They cater to family offices, pension funds, and institutional investors who view alternative assets as core portfolio components rather than exotic bets. The firm embodies a particular European investment philosophy: skepticism of index-heavy approaches, appetite for frontier markets, and belief that skilled managers can exploit inefficiencies where passive strategies cannot. In an era of wealth fragmentation and advisor tech disruption, Artemundi remains a destination for institutional-grade alternative returns.

DEGIRO

🇳🇱 Netherlands

DEGIRO is a Dutch discount broker built on a single observation: the marginal cost of executing a stock trade is software and settlement, not human labour — so the fees European retail investors were paying bore little relation to what a trade actually cost. Founded in Amsterdam in 2008 by former BinckBank employees, it started as an institutional broker, opened to retail investors in 2013, and undercut the incumbents by a wide enough margin to expand across the continent within a few years. The product is deliberately unglamorous. No gamification, no social feed, no notification congratulating you on a €5 deposit. DEGIRO offers direct access to dozens of exchanges across Europe and the US, real market data, and low per-trade pricing, and it assumes you already know what you want to buy. That utilitarian positioning has aged well as the novelty of investing apps has faded and European retail investors have matured past the onboarding experience into simply wanting to invest efficiently. DEGIRO is no longer independent. German broker flatex AG agreed to acquire it for around €250 million in December 2019, with the legal merger into flatexDEGIRO Bank completing in May 2021. The combined group trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, joined the MDAX in March 2025, and converted from an AG to a European Company (SE) at the end of 2025. It now runs three brands — DEGIRO for international European markets, flatex for Germany and Austria, and ViTrade for active traders — together serving more than 3.5 million customers across 16 countries, with over €95 billion in assets under custody and more than 75 million transactions a year. Group revenue reached €559.8 million in 2025 with net income of €160.4 million, up from €71.9 million in 2023. The regulatory record is less tidy than the pricing story. The Dutch AFM fined the bank €2 million in 2022 over late and inaccurate reporting of unusual transactions, reduced to €797,500 on appeal in 2025. BaFin has issued a series of penalties: €1.05 million in 2023 for breaches of banking supervisory rules, accompanied by additional capital requirements and a special representative appointed to oversee remediation; €560,000 in December 2025 for advertising free investment services without clearly disclosing that a processing fee applied; and €1 million in April 2026 for failing to publish inside information promptly. Leadership has churned alongside it — CEO Frank Niehage resigned in 2024 after a public dispute with founder and major shareholder Bernd Förtsch, and former Morgan Stanley Europe CEO Oliver Behrens took over that October.

Founded 2013

Bitpanda

🇦🇹 Austria

Bitpanda is an Austrian multi-asset investment platform that began as a way to buy Bitcoin and became something considerably broader. Founded in Vienna in December 2014 by Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek, and Christian Trummer — originally under the name Coinimal GmbH — it existed to solve a mundane problem: buying crypto in Europe meant wrestling with complex wallets, steep fees, and platforms built for enthusiasts. Bitpanda reduced it to a SEPA transfer and a few taps. The platform now spans crypto, stocks, ETFs, precious metals, commodities, and indices — more than 2,800 assets, all fractional from €1, which is the heart of its pitch to retail savers rather than traders. It serves over 7 million users, employs around 900 people, and has become a household name across German-speaking Europe, helped by sponsorship deals with FC Bayern Munich, AC Milan, and the NFL. Bitpanda was Austria's first unicorn, hitting a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021 on a round led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, with roughly $530 million raised in total and the founders still holding about half the business. Its real differentiator is regulatory. In January 2025 Bitpanda became the first major crypto company to secure a MiCA licence, granted by Germany's BaFin, following it with Austrian and Maltese authorisations that give it passporting rights across all 27 EU member states. It holds more than 17 licences in total, including PSD2 e-money and MiFID II permissions. Now that MiCA is fully enforceable and non-compliant platforms are being pushed off European venues, that head start is the whole game — and it's the positioning the company has been building toward for years. The B2B arm is where the growth story increasingly sits. Bitpanda Technology Solutions is a white-label infrastructure business letting banks, fintechs, and asset managers offer investing and crypto under their own brand, with partners including Deutsche Börse. Demuth has been explicit that the ambition was never a super-app but to be the platform other companies build their investment products on. In March 2026 Bitpanda launched Vision Chain, a regulated Layer-2 blockchain built on Optimism for issuing and settling tokenised stocks, funds, and bonds. Leadership has moved with the strategy: Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad is now CEO, with Demuth as executive chairman.

Founded 2014

Tinaba

🇮🇹 Italy

Tinaba offers mobile banking, payments, and investment services in Italy.

Brand New Day

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Brand New Day provides online pensions, savings, and investment accounts in the Netherlands.

Founded 2010

Invesdor

🇫🇮 Finland

Invesdor is a European equity crowdfunding platform that lets retail investors back early-stage companies and SMEs with growth potential. Founded in 2012, it operates across the Nordic and Baltic regions, democratizing access to private company investments that were once reserved for institutional players and high-net-worth individuals. The platform handles everything from deal sourcing and due diligence to investor communication and cap table management, removing friction from what is traditionally a complex, opaque process. Unlike traditional venture capital, which concentrates returns among a select few, Invesdor allows ordinary Europeans to own pieces of interesting companies—from deeptech startups to established SMEs looking to scale. The company has facilitated hundreds of millions in funding across its markets, positioning itself as the go-to platform for anyone serious about alternative investing. In a landscape crowded with robo-advisors and passive ETF apps, Invesdor stands apart by offering real company ownership and direct founder engagement. It's become essential infrastructure for the European entrepreneurial ecosystem, bridging the funding gap for companies too ambitious for traditional bank loans but too early for institutional VCs.

Founded 2012

Scalable Capital

🇩🇪 Germany

Scalable Capital sits at the intersection of wealth management and technology, offering algorithmic portfolio management that strips away the pretense of traditional advisory. The Berlin-based platform automates investment decisions through factor-based strategies, letting users build diversified portfolios without the six-figure minimums or quarterly check-ins that characterize private banking. What makes Scalable different is its obsession with cost transparency. Rather than burying fees in percentages most investors never question, the platform charges a flat monthly fee regardless of account size, eliminating the perverse incentive for advisors to push larger positions. The investment thesis itself is refreshingly unsentimental: diversify broadly across global equities and bonds, rebalance automatically, and let compound interest do the work. Scalable operates in a market crowded with robo-advisors, but it's positioned itself as the thinking person's alternative to both passive ETF apps and expensive human advisors. It's gained meaningful traction across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where wealth management has traditionally meant stuffy bank meetings and outdated fee structures. The company represents a broader European fintech trend: taking institutional investment practices and making them accessible, affordable, and friction-free for ordinary people who simply want their money to work without constant hand-holding.

Founded 2014

Moneyhub

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Open banking's promise — that financial data, properly used, can help people make better decisions — has been articulated by hundreds of companies. Moneyhub has spent longer than most actually delivering it. Founded in Bristol in 2014, it built one of the UK's first and most comprehensive open banking platforms, aggregating financial accounts, pension data, and property values into a unified financial picture that gives users — and the institutions serving them — a genuinely complete view of financial health. Its B2B platform powers the open banking and financial wellness features of major UK employers, financial advice firms, and pension providers, white-labelling its data aggregation and analytics capabilities under their brands. The pensions integration is particularly significant — Moneyhub connects to pension providers alongside bank accounts, giving users visibility into their retirement savings alongside their current financial position. That breadth of financial data coverage — beyond the current account focus of most open banking platforms — is a genuine differentiator. In the UK open banking ecosystem, where the FCA's consumer duty requirements are pushing financial institutions to demonstrate they understand their customers' broader financial circumstances, Moneyhub's comprehensive data view is becoming infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.

Founded 2014

Partasio

🇨🇭 Switzerland

Most people think of art as something you hang on a wall, not something you add to a portfolio. That’s exactly the gap Partasio is trying to close. Based in Switzerland, Partasio sits at the intersection of finance and culture, turning blue-chip art into a structured investment product. Instead of buying a single painting for millions, investors can access curated portfolios of museum-grade works—fractionalized, packaged, and managed like a financial asset. At its core, the model is simple but powerful. Partasio builds portfolios of 4–6 high-end artworks from globally established artists, typically sourced off-market through private networks. Each portfolio is placed into a single-purpose vehicle, and investors buy into it through bankable certificates—complete with a Swiss ISIN—making it look and behave more like a traditional financial instrument than an art purchase. The pitch isn’t just about access—it’s about diversification. Blue-chip art has historically shown low correlation with traditional asset classes like equities or real estate, making it attractive for investors looking to balance risk. But until recently, that market was largely reserved for ultra-wealthy collectors. Partasio lowers that barrier, with minimum investments starting around CHF 30,000. What makes the platform stand out is how it blends private equity logic with the art world. Portfolios are actively managed over a multi-year horizon, with returns realized when the artworks are sold—typically within three to seven years. The company’s incentives are aligned with investors, earning performance fees only when profits are generated. It’s part of a broader shift in fintech toward alternative assets—where everything from real estate to art is becoming more accessible, structured, and digital. But Partasio leans into something slightly different. It doesn’t try to reinvent art. It simply builds a financial layer around it. In a market that’s historically opaque and exclusive, that alone is enough to make it stand out.

Founded 2022

Freetrade

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Freetrade is a London-based investing app that stripped away the gatekeepers between everyday Europeans and the stock market. Founded on the principle that trading shouldn't cost you a fortune in fees, it lets you buy fractional shares of thousands of stocks and ETFs for zero commission—something that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. The app democratizes retail investing by making it accessible, transparent, and genuinely affordable. While traditional brokers buried fees in spreads and commissions, Freetrade charges nothing for trades and offers a refreshingly straightforward pricing model. You get real-time data, a clean mobile interface, and the ability to build diversified portfolios without watching fees erode returns. In a European market where retail investing was often treated as a luxury product for the wealthy, Freetrade positioned itself as the alternative—serious investing without the pretense or the price tag. The platform appeals to younger investors who want to own individual stocks and ETFs but were previously priced out or intimidated by legacy brokers. Today, Freetrade represents a shift in how Europeans think about stock ownership: not as something reserved for the financially elite, but as a fundamental right. It's embedded itself in the broader fintech movement toward dematerializing finance and making capital markets participation the default rather than the exception.

Founded 2017