Alternatives to Token

SumUp

🇩🇪 Germany

SumUp is Europe's answer to the merchant services problem: a scrappy fintech that turned point-of-sale payments into something actually accessible. While legacy payment processors still treat small businesses like second-class customers, SumUp built hardware and software that work together seamlessly, letting anyone from a street vendor to a café owner accept cards in minutes, not months. The company started by selling cheap card readers—simple, elegant devices that plugged into phones. But that was just the wedge. Today SumUp offers a stack: card readers, invoicing, basic accounting, and increasingly, working capital tools. It's the financial operating system for the SME who doesn't want to negotiate with a relationship manager. What sets SumUp apart in Europe is its refusal to stay in the payments lane. Most competitors eventually build one feature and call it a day. SumUp keeps layering—acquiring merchant acquirer licenses, launching its own acquiring infrastructure in key markets, adding payment links and e-commerce solutions. The company operates across Western Europe and beyond, working with hundreds of thousands of merchants who are too small for traditional banking but too important to ignore. SumUp represents the practical, unglamorous evolution of fintech: it's not trying to reinvent banking or blockchain. It's solving the cash flow problem for people who actually run businesses. That's a bigger opportunity than it sounds.

Founded 2012

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

Nexi

🇮🇹 Italy

Nexi is Italy's largest payment services operator, controlling the infrastructure that moves money across the country's retail and corporate sectors. Founded in 2013 through a merger of two major Italian payment processors, it manages card transactions, merchant acquiring, and digital payment rails for banks, retailers, and businesses across Europe. The company operates across the full payments stack—from traditional POS terminals and card networks to modern API-based solutions and instant payment systems. Unlike most fintech startups, Nexi doesn't target consumers directly. Instead, it powers the payment backbone for Italian and European financial institutions and retailers, processing tens of billions in transactions annually. Its business model sits at the intersection of traditional payment infrastructure and modern open banking, positioning it as a critical node in Europe's shift toward real-time payments and embedded finance. Nexi's role is unglamorous but essential: it's the plumbing that makes modern commerce work, handling everything from contactless cards to mobile wallets to cross-border transfers. In the broader European fintech landscape, it represents the "boring" but profitable core—the infrastructure layer that fintechs themselves depend on to function.

Founded 2013

Yapily

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Yapily sits at the intersection of open banking and embedded finance, building the plumbing that lets fintech companies and enterprises tap into banking data and payments without reinventing the wheel. Founded in 2016, the London-based company operates as an API infrastructure layer—connecting to banks across Europe and beyond to unlock account information, payment initiation, and consent management at scale. What makes Yapily different is how it abstracts away the complexity of working with hundreds of banks and their inconsistent technical standards. Rather than forcing developers to build individual integrations for each bank's API, Yapily provides a unified interface that normalizes everything. It's the translator between your app and the messy reality of legacy banking infrastructure. The company operates in the B2B2C space, partnering with fintechs, neobanks, and enterprise software providers who need banking connectivity but lack the resources to build it themselves. Their customer base spans lending platforms, wealth apps, accounting software, and payment orchestration layers—essentially anyone whose product benefits from real-time access to customer bank accounts or the ability to initiate payments. Yapily's positioning is deliberately unsexy: they're infrastructure, not consumer-facing. But that's precisely the point. In a landscape crowded with consumer fintechs chasing headlines, Yapily has built a quiet, profitable business serving the builders themselves. They're to open banking what Stripe is to payments—the backbone that lets innovation happen faster.

Founded 2016

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

Swan

🇫🇷 France

Swan is reshaping how European businesses handle payments by offering a modern, developer-friendly infrastructure layer that sits between companies and the complexity of traditional banking rails. Rather than forcing startups and established firms to navigate fragmented payment ecosystems, Swan bundles together payment processing, banking APIs, and compliance tooling into a single, coherent platform. The company targets mid-market and enterprise customers—think e-commerce platforms, SaaS businesses, and financial services—who need to embed payments into their core operations without hiring a dedicated payments team. Swan's core strength lies in its ability to strip away legacy banking friction: it handles card processing, instant payments, payouts, and cross-border transfers through a unified API, while managing the regulatory headaches that usually consume engineering bandwidth. In a European landscape crowded with payment gateways and banking APIs, Swan distinguishes itself through developer experience and architectural clarity. Where competitors often bolt together disparate services, Swan presents a genuinely integrated stack—one codebase, one dashboard, one billing model. The company serves as both a payments operator and a bridge to traditional banking, making it particularly valuable for businesses scaling beyond their first million transactions. Swan represents a broader maturation in European fintech infrastructure: the shift from "we'll process your payments" to "we'll become your payments backbone," enabling a generation of companies to focus on their core product rather than payment plumbing.

Founded 2019

Mambu

🇩🇪 Germany

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

Currency Cloud

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Currency Cloud powers cross-border payments for fintechs, banks, and platforms that move money internationally. Rather than building payment rails from scratch, companies plug into Currency Cloud's infrastructure to send, receive, and manage multi-currency transactions at scale. The platform handles the compliance complexity, FX pricing, and settlement logistics that make global payments so difficult. What sets Currency Cloud apart is its positioning as the backbone rather than the front-end. While fintech darlings grab headlines with sleek consumer apps, Currency Cloud quietly powers payments behind the scenes for hundreds of financial services companies across Europe, Asia, and beyond. The company works with everyone from neobanks to traditional institutions to embedded finance platforms, letting them offer international payments without the headache of building their own infrastructure. The European fintech scene has become increasingly reliant on infrastructure layers like this one—companies that solve the hard infrastructure problems so others can focus on customer experience and product innovation. Currency Cloud sits in that crucial middle tier, handling the pipes while others decorate the storefronts. It's a less visible kind of power, but arguably more fundamental to how modern fintech works.

Founded 2012

TrueLayer

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

TrueLayer is a payments and open banking infrastructure platform that lets fintech companies, payment processors, and traditional banks access real-time financial data and initiate payments directly from consumer bank accounts across Europe. Rather than building APIs from scratch or waiting months for bank integrations, developers plug into TrueLayer's unified network and immediately get access to payment initiation, account aggregation, and transaction data from thousands of financial institutions. The company operates as a critical middleware layer in European fintech. While most payment infrastructure still relies on cards or legacy rails, TrueLayer routes transactions through bank-grade open banking rails, making transfers faster, cheaper, and less friction-heavy. Its API-first approach means a startup launching in five countries gets the same clean integration experience as an enterprise player. In the competitive open banking space, TrueLayer stands out through breadth of coverage and developer experience. The platform supports payments in 17+ European countries and has built integrations with hundreds of banks—not through partnerships alone, but through technical depth in handling regional quirks and regulatory complexity. Its customer base spans neobanks like Wise and Revolut, major payment processors, and traditional banks replatforming their operations. TrueLayer essentially democratized access to Europe's banking infrastructure at a moment when open banking regulations made that access possible but still technically demanding. For any fintech building on the continent, it's become a foundational piece of modern payment architecture.

Founded 2016

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

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