Best Embedded Finance Platforms in Europe

Banking used to be the thing companies sent customers away to do. Needed a loan? Go see a bank. Wanted a card? Open an account somewhere. Needed to take payments? Sign up with a separate provider. That whole arrangement is coming apart.

Financial services are increasingly showing up inside the products people already use. Business software can offer accounts. A marketplace can run the payments between its buyers and sellers. A travel company can tuck insurance and financing into the booking flow. A payroll platform can quietly become a financial hub for the people it pays. That's the territory of embedded finance, and it's one of the fastest-growing corners of European fintech precisely because it rewrites the role financial services play. Rather than sending customers off to a bank, the bank-like bits appear naturally inside the everyday digital experience.

The companies making this possible are the infrastructure underneath it all — they supply the APIs, the licences, the compliance machinery, and the financial building blocks that let non-financial businesses become part of the financial system. Europe is a particularly interesting place to do this because the market is so fragmented: payment habits, banking systems, and regulatory regimes all differ from country to country. Building embedded finance across the continent takes more than a clean API; it takes access to genuinely regulated infrastructure.

The names that come up most often include Solaris, Swan, Treezor, Modulr, Banking Circle, ClearBank, Railsr, Vodeno, Adyen, and Mangopay. Some concentrate on banking services, others on payments, marketplaces, or financial infrastructure more broadly. And the eventual winners here probably won't be the companies with the most recognisable consumer products. They'll be the ones quietly turning into the financial engine behind thousands of other businesses.

Comparison table

Pros and cons

Solaris

Solaris is one of the most recognised names in European embedded finance, and it built that reputation on a simple premise: a company should be able to offer financial products without becoming a bank itself. Through its banking licence and technology platform, Solaris lets businesses embed accounts, cards, payments, and lending straight into their own products.

Regulatory depth is what really sets it apart. Embedded finance looks straightforward from the outside, but behind every account, card, or payment product sits a thicket of requirements around compliance, safeguarding, risk, and reporting. Solaris brings a licensed banking layer that most companies simply couldn't stand up on their own, which makes it attractive to fintechs, marketplaces, and platforms wanting to launch financial services across Europe.

The catch is that banking infrastructure is, well, complicated. Working with a regulated provider demands more planning, more compliance coordination, and more operational maturity than bolting on a payment button.

Pros

Solaris offers one of the broadest embedded finance propositions in Europe, so companies thinking beyond simple payments can use it as a foundation for fuller financial products. Its European banking licence is also a real asset for anyone planning to expand across several markets.

Cons

The same depth that makes Solaris powerful can stretch out implementations. Companies after something lightweight may be happier with a more specialised provider.

Swan

Swan is the newer-generation take on embedded banking, and it's built with software companies firmly in mind. Rather than constructing banking infrastructure themselves, SaaS platforms can lean on Swan to add accounts, cards, and payment features. The distinction is one of mindset: a traditional bank thinks in terms of financial products, whereas Swan treats those products as software features — which is exactly why it lands so well with vertical SaaS, accounting tools, HR software, and marketplaces.

Simplicity is its strong suit. A company can wire in financial services without spinning up a banking department internally. The limit is that Swan isn't built for every scenario; businesses chasing complex lending products, large-scale banking infrastructure, or institutional payment operations will likely need something broader.

Pros

Swan is among the best options for companies that want finance woven into their software experience. It fits the whole "every company becoming a fintech" idea by lowering the bar to adding financial features.

Cons

It's geared toward embedded banking experiences rather than serving as a wholesale replacement for traditional financial infrastructure.

Treezor

Treezor is one of Europe's more established embedded finance platforms, known for helping businesses build payment products, card programmes, and wallet experiences without creating their own financial infrastructure. Payments are where it's strongest — for anyone building a fintech app, a marketplace, or a digital wallet, Treezor supplies a lot of the underlying pieces needed to launch regulated payment services. It also sits inside the wider Société Générale ecosystem, which gives it a different profile from the independent fintech infrastructure crowd.

The question mark is positioning. Treezor is excellent at cards and payments, but companies wanting broader banking services will probably weigh it against the likes of Solaris or ClearBank.

Pros

It's mature, regulated, and deeply plugged into European payment infrastructure, which makes it especially relevant for payment-heavy products.

Cons

It isn't always the first name that comes up for a complete embedded banking proposition.

Modulr

Modulr zeroes in on one of the most important parts of embedded finance: moving money. It provides infrastructure for payments, accounts, and financial workflows, and rather than chasing a consumer banking experience, it concentrates on helping businesses automate their financial operations. That makes it a strong match for companies wrangling payouts, payroll, accounts payable, and business payments.

Focus is the advantage. Plenty of embedded finance use cases aren't about inventing a shiny new account experience at all — they're about making existing financial processes faster and more automated. The flip side is that anyone after a broad banking platform may need to bring in additional providers.

Pros

Solid payments infrastructure and API capabilities make Modulr a good fit for operational finance, particularly when money movement itself is the core problem.

Cons

It's more specialised around payments than full embedded banking.

Banking Circle

Banking Circle sits closer to the infrastructure end of embedded finance, focused on helping banks, payment companies, and marketplaces move money internationally. Its infrastructure handles cross-border payments, accounts, and financial services, and scale is its biggest selling point. Moving money between countries is one of the genuinely hard problems in finance, and Banking Circle has put most of its energy into solving exactly that. The trade-off is that it's less aimed at smaller software companies looking for a simple embedded product.

Pros

Strong for global payment flows, financial institutions, and large platforms.

Cons

More institutional and less plug-and-play than the newer embedded finance providers.

ClearBank

ClearBank is one of the strongest UK examples of embedded banking infrastructure — a regulated bank built around APIs, so businesses can embed accounts and payment services into their own products. Its real advantage is the combination of banking infrastructure with genuinely modern technology, which gives UK fintechs an appealing base for building financial products without becoming a bank themselves. The constraint is geography: ClearBank is a natural fit for UK companies but less obviously positioned for broad EU coverage.

Mangopay

Mangopay is one of the most recognisable embedded finance platforms for marketplaces, and that's no accident. Marketplaces carry distinctive financial challenges — collecting from buyers, distributing funds to sellers, handling refunds, and managing tangled payment relationships — and Mangopay built itself squarely around that problem. Specialisation is its strength: instead of trying to cover every embedded finance use case, it goes deep on platforms and marketplaces. The corollary is that companies operating outside the marketplace model may find other providers a better match.

Pricing

Embedded finance pricing is rarely simple, because what you pay depends on what you're building. A company embedding payments into a marketplace ends up with a very different model from a SaaS company launching business accounts or a fintech rolling out cards. The usual factors include transaction volume, number of accounts, card usage, payment volume, API usage, compliance requirements, geographic markets, and how complicated onboarding is.

Providers like Swan and Modulr tend to suit companies after modular infrastructure with usage-based pricing. The enterprise platforms — Solaris, ClearBank, Banking Circle — usually involve more customised commercial agreements, since the relationship runs through regulated financial services.

The most common mistake is staring only at platform fees. The real cost of embedded finance also includes compliance operations, customer support, fraud management, reconciliation, and the regulatory responsibilities you take on. The cheapest provider isn't always the cheapest solution.

Use cases

Best for SaaS companies

Swan is one of the strongest options for SaaS companies adding financial features. A project management platform, an accounting tool, or an HR system can evolve from plain software into a financial workflow by layering on accounts, payments, or cards — which is exactly the trend driving so much of fintech right now: software companies turning into financial platforms.

Best for marketplaces

Mangopay is a natural fit for marketplaces, where money moves between several parties at once and a standard payment processor often isn't enough. Mangopay, Adyen, and similar providers are designed around that very complexity.

Best for fintech startups

Solaris, Treezor, and Swan are all strong candidates for fintech startups, and the right one comes down to ambition. A simple wallet calls for different infrastructure than a full banking application — so the real question is whether the startup wants to build a fintech product or become something closer to a bank.

Best for embedded banking

Solaris and ClearBank are among the best choices when you need real banking infrastructure, letting businesses build financial products without going through the ordeal of obtaining their own banking licence.

Best for embedded payments

Modulr, Treezor, and Mangopay shine when payments are the core use case. These providers are about moving money efficiently rather than building out complete banking experiences.

Alternatives

Adyen is a major alternative for payment-focused companies. It isn't a traditional embedded finance platform, but it supplies payment infrastructure, acquiring, and financial products to businesses worldwide, and it's especially strong at the enterprise end.

Stripe is one of the biggest global competitors in this space, helping companies embed payments, financial accounts, and other services into their software. It's a particular favourite among developers and internet businesses.

Checkout.com competes mainly on global payments infrastructure, and it's relevant for digital businesses that need international payment capabilities.

Banking-as-a-Service providers like Solaris, ClearBank, and Swan overlap heavily with embedded finance. The difference is one of emphasis: BaaS is more about the underlying banking infrastructure, while embedded finance is about the customer experience built on top of it.

FAQ

What is embedded finance?
It's the practice of building financial services directly into non-financial products — a marketplace offering payments, a SaaS platform offering business accounts, a retailer offering financing.

What's the difference between embedded finance and Banking-as-a-Service?
BaaS is the infrastructure that makes financial products possible. Embedded finance is the end result: those services showing up inside another company's product.

What is the best embedded finance platform in Europe?
There's no single winner. Solaris is strong for broad banking infrastructure, Swan for SaaS companies, Treezor for payment products, and Mangopay for marketplaces.

Why is embedded finance growing in Europe?
Businesses increasingly want to own more of the customer relationship. Rather than sending people off to a bank, they can offer financial services right inside the products customers already use.

Can any company become a fintech?
Technically, plenty of companies can embed financial products. The hard parts are regulation, compliance, and customer trust — infrastructure providers smooth the path, but financial services still come with serious operational responsibility.

Is embedded finance the future of banking?
It's likely to become a big part of how financial services get delivered. The future may not be customers choosing between "banks" and "non-banks" at all. Instead, financial services may simply turn up wherever people already work, shop, and run their businesses.

Photo by Lukas S on Unsplash