The Fintech Status Audit 2026

The finding

We checked every company in the fintechdatabase.eu directory against its current operating status. Nineteen are no longer what they were.

Nine have been acquired and no longer operate independently. Nine have ceased operating entirely. One is winding down without having announced it.

That is 3.6% of the directory. The number itself is unremarkable — companies fail and companies get bought, and a 3.6% attrition rate across a young industry is not a crisis.

What is remarkable is how many of them are still listed as ordinary, operating companies everywhere else.

Method, and its limits

This is a verification audit, not a survey. We reviewed every company in the directory, checked whether its website still resolves and still belongs to the company, cross-referenced regulatory registers and company registries where relevant, and recorded a status with a documented reason.

Two limitations matter and we would rather state them than have them found.

This is a floor, not a total. We can only report what we verified. A company with a live website and no news coverage will read as active whether it employs two hundred people or two. The true attrition figure across European fintech is certainly higher than 3.6%.

The directory is not a representative sample. It covers 528 companies across 30 European countries, weighted toward those with public profiles and identifiable products. Very small and very private companies are underrepresented, and those are precisely the ones most likely to disappear unnoticed.

The full list, with the reason recorded for each, is available as a downloadable dataset.

The nine that were acquired

Three of the nine went to US acquirers. That is a third, and the three cases have something specific in common: Bitstamp, Minna and GoHenry each held something a large American company found faster to buy than to build. Bitstamp had fourteen years of accumulated licences across more than fifty jurisdictions, which gave Robinhood a regulated route into European and UK crypto that would have taken years to obtain. Minna had subscription-cancellation infrastructure embedded inside more than a hundred million bank customers' apps, which Mastercard wanted to fix a problem on its own rails. GoHenry had a trusted consumer brand among British parents.

The European acquisitions follow a different logic. Mollie bought GoCardless for coverage — cards and local payment methods on one side, bank debit and account-to-account on the other, with almost no overlap. BAWAG bought Knab for a Dutch retail deposit base. Pluxee bought Cobee because it led the Spanish benefits market by volume but Cobee had the better product.

There is one case worth separating out. Pockit acquired Monese for a reported £15 million after Monese had raised more than $200 million and HSBC had written its stake to zero. That is not a strategic acquisition; that is a distressed asset changing hands at a fraction of what went into it.

The nine that stopped

These split cleanly into two groups, and the second group is the interesting one.

Five ended through acquisition. Earthport into Visa Direct, Contis into Solaris, Lendico into ING, Verse closed by Block, Dotpay merged into Przelewy24. In each case a company was bought, its technology absorbed, and its brand quietly retired. That is a normal and largely healthy market function.

Four simply stopped. Cake, Biller, Ritmo and November did not announce a wind-down, file a visible insolvency, or publish a final blog post. Their websites went offline or their domains were sold. Two of the four now redirect to unrelated commercial content — one to a domain reseller, one to a gaming site.

Kevin. is the exception that proves how rare visibility is. Its collapse was documented in detail because the Bank of Lithuania published its supervisory findings — audited accounts four months overdue, capital adequacy breaches, inadequate internal controls — before appointing a temporary representative. The company had raised roughly $75 million, and its headcount had already fallen from 113 to 22. Without a regulator making that public, Kevin. would have been a fifth silent disappearance.

The reason this matters

Reinvest24 is the clearest illustration, and it is why we started recording status at all.

The Estonian property crowdfunding platform has not processed investor withdrawals for over a year. Roughly €26 million of investor capital sits in recovery. It never obtained the ECSP authorisation that became mandatory for European crowdfunding platforms in November 2023, and financial regulators in Estonia, Spain and Norway have issued public warnings about it. Its operating company is down to a single employee.

In 2026, affiliate review sites were still publishing positive "hands-on" reviews of the platform, describing steady returns and monthly distributions.

That is not a rounding error in someone's content calendar. Those reviews are what a person finds when they search the platform's name to check whether their money is safe, and they are wrong in a way that costs money. They exist because the sites publishing them are paid per referred investor, and a review saying "do not invest here" pays nothing.

The same structural gap applies without the financial incentive. Directories, databases and vendor comparison sites overwhelmingly record companies at the moment of entry and rarely revisit them. Acquisitions get noted when they make headlines; quiet disappearances do not get noted at all. A listing does not decay. It just sits there, indistinguishable from a company that is thriving.

For an investor, that gap costs money. For a business evaluating a vendor, it costs weeks — a procurement process aimed at a company that no longer exists. For anyone trying to understand the shape of the European fintech market, it inflates the picture: the count of companies in any category is a count of companies that once existed, not companies that currently do.

What we changed

Every company in the directory now carries an explicit operating status: active, acquired, winding down, or no longer operating. Companies that have been acquired or have ceased operating stay listed, with the status displayed and the reason recorded, rather than being deleted.

Deletion is the easier option and the worse one. Someone searching for a company that failed is usually the person who most needs to find out what happened to it.

Companies marked as no longer operating or winding down are excluded from recommendation contexts — they no longer appear as alternatives to other companies, or in "notable companies" lists. They remain fully searchable and listed.

We will re-audit quarterly and publish what changes.

Full dataset

The nineteen companies, with status, reason and verification date, are available as a CSV download. The data is free to use and quote with attribution to fintechdatabase.eu.

If you are aware of a company in the directory that has been acquired, wound down, or ceased operating and is not marked as such, we would rather be told than be wrong: hello@fintechdatabase.eu

fintechdatabase.eu is an independent directory of 528 European fintech companies across 18 categories and 30 countries. It carries no advertising, no paid placements and no affiliate partnerships. Our listing policy explains how companies are included.