Charles Egly and Geoffroy Guigou founded Prêt d'Union in Paris in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis that had made French consumers unusually receptive to the argument that banks were not serving them well on credit. Renamed Younited, the company built an instant consumer credit business on an underwriting engine designed to deliver a decision in seconds rather than days — personal loans, point-of-sale financing, and BNPL-adjacent instalment products distributed both directly to consumers and through retailers, banks and fintechs as embedded credit. More than a million customers have borrowed through it, and the business operates across France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany, holding a French credit institution licence that passports across the EU.
Younited took an unusual route to the public markets. Rather than a conventional IPO, it combined with Iris Financial — a listed acquisition vehicle — in December 2024, bringing roughly €152.6 million of capital into the business, and began trading on Euronext Paris in January 2025, with listings across Euronext Amsterdam and Paris. Egly continues as chief executive of the listed entity, Younited Financial. The company had raised around $344 million privately before the combination, from investors including Eurazeo, Bpifrance and Kima Ventures.
The strategic logic is that Younited is a lender and a technology vendor at the same time. Its own consumer brand proves the underwriting, and Younited Credit's embedded finance business sells that capability to third parties who want to offer instant credit inside their own products — the same dual model visible at Klarna and Abound. The pressure comes from both directions: BNPL providers compressing the small-ticket end of consumer credit, and the EU's revised Consumer Credit Directive raising affordability and disclosure requirements across the category. As a listed lender, Younited now has to demonstrate through a full credit cycle what private consumer lenders can defer — and it does so with public reporting, which for this directory's purposes makes it one of the more transparent lenders in the European market.