Alternatives to Tokeny

ION Group

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Andrea Pignataro founded ION in London in 1999, after leaving a trading role at Salomon Brothers with a conviction that the software running global markets was held together with too much manual process. Over the following two and a half decades he built ION into one of the largest, most acquisitive players in capital-markets technology — absorbing dozens of specialist vendors, including Fidessa and Broadway Technology, and folding them into a single group. The core business is still the unglamorous plumbing of institutional finance: trading platforms across equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, and cleared derivatives; risk management; post-trade processing; clearing and settlement; and market data. Investment banks, hedge funds, and corporate treasuries run parts of their daily operations on ION's systems, often without their own customers ever knowing it. Less visible is ION's regulatory technology line. Products including ION LookOut and Fidessa Surveillance handle trade surveillance, market-abuse detection, and regulatory reporting across multiple jurisdictions, and ION's compliance tools have placed in FinTech Global's RegTech 100 list for three consecutive years. It's a smaller part of the business than the trading and post-trade platforms, but a genuine one — which is why ION appears under both Capital Markets and RegTech in this directory, rather than just one. The company is headquartered in London, employs more than 13,000 people across over 50 offices worldwide, and remains privately held under Pignataro's control — a scale most consumer-facing fintechs never approach, built almost entirely on customers who are themselves in finance.

Founded 1999

Blockchain.com

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Blockchain.com is one of the oldest and most-visited crypto infrastructure platforms in the world, operating as a bridge between traditional finance and digital assets. The company runs a full-stack crypto ecosystem—a blockchain explorer that millions use to track transactions, a self-custody wallet that puts users in control of their private keys, and a suite of institutional-grade services for serious players. Where most crypto platforms treat blockchain as a trading venue, Blockchain.com treats it as infrastructure. The platform serves retail users seeking transparency and control, developers building on-chain applications, and institutions entering crypto with proper compliance frameworks. The company has maintained a distinctly crypto-native stance while gradually building enterprise services that acknowledge regulatory reality. Its wallet remains one of the most downloaded in the space, offering both simplicity for newcomers and advanced features for power users. Blockchain.com sits at an interesting inflection point in fintech—old enough to have survived multiple market cycles, serious enough to work with regulators, yet still fundamentally aligned with decentralized principles. The platform's role in the broader landscape is foundational: it enables crypto participation across the entire user spectrum, from curious individuals to multinational corporations managing digital asset reserves.

Founded 2011

Lavanet

🇮🇸 Iceland

Lavanet is building a decentralized infrastructure network that lets applications and services tap into blockchain resources without the usual constraints of centralized providers. Think of it as a peer-to-peer marketplace for computational power, but for Web3 apps. Instead of relying on a single RPC provider or node operator, developers can access redundant, distributed infrastructure that's both more reliable and resistant to censorship. The network operates through a token-incentivized model where node operators earn rewards for serving requests, creating an open market for blockchain infrastructure rather than a walled garden controlled by a few large players. This approach addresses a real friction point in crypto adoption: the dependency on centralized infrastructure providers that can throttle, monitor, or shut down access. Lavanet democratizes access to blockchain resources by spreading that responsibility across thousands of independent operators. For developers, it means faster, cheaper, and more resilient connections to blockchains. For node operators, it's an opportunity to monetize spare computational capacity. In the broader context of decentralized finance and Web3, Lavanet represents infrastructure-layer innovation—the kind of plumbing work that rarely gets headlines but is essential for making the entire ecosystem more robust and genuinely decentralized.

Founded 2022

Credit Benchmark

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Credit Benchmark sits at the intersection of market transparency and institutional risk management. Founded to solve a specific problem—banks and asset managers couldn't easily benchmark their credit exposures against the broader market—it's evolved into a critical infrastructure play in the institutional credit space. The platform aggregates anonymized credit opinions from major financial institutions, creating a real-time view of how the world's largest investors see credit risk. Rather than relying on traditional ratings agencies or proprietary models, Credit Benchmark lets institutions see how their views stack up against peers, identify outliers, and stress-test assumptions across thousands of corporates and sovereigns. This crowdsourced intelligence has become essential for risk committees, portfolio managers, and regulators navigating an increasingly complex credit landscape. The company operates quietly but with significant reach—used by central banks, pension funds, and major corporates to understand systemic credit risk. In a world where traditional credit signals lag reality, Credit Benchmark offers something rare: a real-time consensus view built on the opinions of sophisticated investors who have real money at stake. It's infrastructure for an industry that desperately needed transparency on how credit risk is actually perceived, not how it's officially rated.

Founded 2011

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

LHV

🇪🇪 Estonia

LHV has the distinction of being both Estonia's largest domestic bank and one of the most important banking infrastructure providers in European fintech. Founded in Tallinn in 1999 — making it ancient by Estonian standards in a country whose digital infrastructure is itself only a few decades old — LHV grew from an investment firm into a full retail bank, navigating Estonia's evolution from post-Soviet transition economy to digital society more successfully than many of its peers. The bank serves Estonian retail and business customers across the full range of banking products, with particular strength in investment services that reflects its origins as a brokerage. Beyond its domestic banking business, LHV has built a Pan-European operation providing banking services to fintechs — issuing accounts, IBANs, and payment infrastructure to many of the UK and European fintechs that needed banking partnerships to operate compliantly. The fintech banking business has made LHV one of the most important behind-the-scenes infrastructure providers in European fintech, even if most of the consumer-facing companies that rely on it never mention LHV publicly. In the European banking landscape, LHV represents the unusual combination of small national bank and Pan-European fintech enabler — a position that few institutions have managed to occupy.

Founded 1999

BVNK

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

BVNK is a digital asset infrastructure company built for the institutional world. Founded to bridge traditional finance and crypto, it provides custody, settlement, and liquidity services for digital assets across multiple blockchain networks. Rather than positioning itself as a trading platform or exchange, BVNK operates as plumbing—a behind-the-scenes infrastructure layer that lets banks, payment processors, and fintech companies add digital asset capabilities to their existing systems. The platform handles the technical and regulatory complexity that kept institutions out of crypto, offering institutional-grade security and compliance tooling alongside access to decentralized finance. In a market flooded with retail-focused crypto products, BVNK targets the institutional infrastructure gap. It serves as the counterparty settlement layer and liquidity provider for financial institutions that want to offer digital assets without building their own custody and execution infrastructure. The company counts major payment networks and banking infrastructure providers among its early customers, positioning itself as the connective tissue between traditional finance rails and blockchain networks. BVNK reflects a maturation in crypto infrastructure—less about speculation and retail adoption, more about institutional plumbing that will quietly power the next generation of financial services.

Founded 2021

Dateio

🇨🇿 Czech Republic

Dateio is a European open banking platform that sits at the intersection of data and credit. The company aggregates financial data from multiple banks and institutions across Europe, then applies machine learning to unlock lending decisions and financial insights that traditional scoring can't capture. Unlike legacy credit bureaus, Dateio builds its models on real transaction history and behavioral patterns, not just loan defaults and payment records. The company positions itself as a data partner for fintechs, banks, and lenders who need smarter underwriting. Rather than building consumer-facing products, Dateio focuses on B2B infrastructure—providing APIs that other companies plug into to understand customer creditworthiness in real time. This approach means Dateio operates in the quieter, more valuable layer of fintech: the plumbing that powers better decisions. In a market crowded with credit score providers and ID verification vendors, Dateio stands out by going deeper into the data layer. Most competitors offer point solutions; Dateio aggregates, normalizes, and analyzes transaction flows across borders. That matters in Europe, where fragmented banking systems and privacy rules have made cross-border financial data unusually hard to access. For lenders tired of crude risk models, Dateio offers a more granular, behavior-based alternative that reflects how Europeans actually spend and save money. The company represents a broader shift in European fintech toward infrastructure and data intelligence, rather than consumer apps. As regulation tightens and competition intensifies in lending, better data becomes the primary competitive advantage. Dateio operates in that space.

Founded 2017

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

Paymium

🇫🇷 France

Bitcoin exchanges in Europe's early crypto years were characterised by technical fragility, regulatory opacity, and the constant possibility that the platform you were using would simply disappear. Paymium was founded in Paris in 2011 as one of Europe's first Bitcoin exchanges and has the unusual distinction of still operating today — a survival record that sets it apart from the majority of its early-era peers. Its longevity reflects a deliberate choice to operate as a regulated financial institution from the beginning, obtaining French regulatory authorisation and maintaining compliance standards that many early crypto platforms treated as optional. Paymium serves both retail and institutional users in the French market, offering Bitcoin trading with the regulatory framework and consumer protection standards of a licensed payment institution. In the contemporary European crypto landscape — dominated by Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken — Paymium is a niche player by volume but a significant one by longevity and regulatory credibility. For French institutional investors and the segment of retail users who prioritise regulatory protection over trading fees, Paymium's fifteen-year track record of compliant operation is a genuine differentiator in an industry where that record is extraordinarily rare.

Founded 2011

Lendable

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Lendable is the most valuable European fintech most consumers have never heard of, which is partly by design. Martin Kissinger — German-born, LSE and Oxford, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Rocket Internet before founding his own company — started it in London in 2014 with Victoria van Lennep, Paul Pamment, and Jakob Schwarz, in the dying days of the peer-to-peer lending era. The insight that outlived P2P was structural: don't hold loans on your own balance sheet and don't take retail money — aggregate institutional capital from pension funds and hedge funds, and compete purely on underwriting. Lendable's machine-learning models automate credit decisions end to end, approving personal loans in seconds, and the company takes fees for origination and servicing while the institutions take the credit risk. Asset-light, capital-efficient, and — unusually for the category — profitable early and quietly, a combination that had Sifted profiling it as one of Europe's most secretive fintechs back in 2020. The quiet ended with the numbers. Revenue jumped 90% to £446 million in 2025 with profits more than doubling, and Experian data showed Lendable issued more new consumer credit loans by volume than any other UK lender that year — any bank included — while ranking second in new credit cards issued. A twelve-year-old company with 643 employees out-originating institutions with balance sheets a hundred times its size is the clearest available evidence that consumer credit underwriting is now a data and automation problem, not a branch-network problem. The product range has widened from personal loans into credit cards and car finance, and in July 2026 the company priced its debut public securitisation — a £500 million deal backed by UK personal loans under the Hoxton Consumer Loan Funding programme — opening a cheaper, deeper funding channel alongside its institutional partnerships. The capital story has been correspondingly disciplined: roughly $290 million in equity across its history, a £210 million round led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in March 2022 valuing the company at £3.5 billion, and Goldman Sachs among the backers. The valuation hasn't been retested publicly since — which cuts both ways in a repriced fintech market — and the IPO question follows Lendable around as persistently as it follows Monzo, with nothing filed. Expansion is the current chapter: the US operation established in 2021 is where profits are being reinvested, with Mexico planned next. Kissinger's thesis for why a lender travels better than a neobank is worth noting — personal loans and credit cards are structurally similar across markets, while current-account propositions are deeply local. The honest caveat is the one that applies to every consumer lender that has only grown: Lendable's model has been profitable through a decade that included a pandemic and a rate shock, but unsecured consumer credit is cyclical, and an originator whose volumes now lead the UK market carries UK household credit exposure at scale — mediated to institutional investors, but reputationally and operationally its own. The machine has out-underwritten the banks in benign and bumpy conditions alike; a genuine credit downturn remains the test that separates good models from lucky ones.

Founded 2013