Banking APIs in Europe

Mollie

Adriaan Mol built Mollie's first backend while living with his parents in the Netherlands in 2004. No investors, no office, no team — just a founder and an idea that small businesses deserved a payment integration that didn't require a team of lawyers and a six-month setup process. He bootstrapped it for over fifteen years before taking outside funding in 2019. By then, Mollie had already grown into one of the most important payment platforms in European e-commerce, entirely on the back of a product that developers actually liked using. The proposition is straightforward: one API, one dashboard, and access to the payment methods that actually matter across Europe. That means iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna and SEPA Direct Debit everywhere, alongside cards, Apple Pay, and a growing list of local methods that would otherwise require separate integrations and separate acquirer relationships. Mollie handles the compliance, the fraud monitoring, and the settlement complexity. Merchants get a clean interface and a single invoice. For the 250,000 businesses using Mollie today — ranging from Gymshark and Wild to local bakeries and market stalls, as CEO Koen Köppen regularly points out — the appeal is less about feature lists and more about what they don't have to think about. European payments are fragmented by design. Every country has its preferred methods, its own regulatory quirks, its own consumer habits. Mollie's job is to make that invisible. The numbers from 2024 reflect a company that has found its model. Revenue reached €214 million, up 28% year on year, with gross profit growing 30% to €115 million and the company returning to positive EBITDA for the first time since 2018. Mollie raised a total of $940 million in funding and was valued at $6.5 billion following its 2021 Series C led by Blackstone. The most significant recent development is the acquisition of GoCardless in December 2025 — bringing the UK-based direct debit specialist into the Mollie group and substantially expanding its recurring payments and bank transfer capabilities across Europe. Combined, the two companies cover a considerable share of European e-commerce payment infrastructure. Mollie is still headquartered in Amsterdam, with around 900 employees across offices in Ghent, London, Lisbon, Munich, Milan, Paris, and beyond.

Founded 2004

Tink

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

Omnius

Omnius is a European fintech infrastructure player that builds the plumbing for digital finance. Rather than launching consumer apps or chasing trends, the company focuses on giving financial institutions and fintech operators the core technology to move faster. The platform handles payment processing, account management, and the underlying APIs that let banks and non-banks operate at scale without reinventing the wheel. What distinguishes Omnius in a crowded infrastructure market is its pragmatic approach to complexity. European banks still manage legacy core systems alongside new digital channels—a messy, expensive reality most fintech companies ignore. Omnius doesn't fight that; it sits in the middle, connecting old and new, and abstracts the chaos away from the business logic above it. The company targets institutions that need to modernize faster than their technology stacks allow. That includes challenger banks that need banking-as-a-service foundations, traditional banks building new digital channels, and fintech companies that want to scale without owning every layer. It's unsexy infrastructure work—the kind that doesn't generate headlines but quietly powers the financial services layer that consumers interact with. In the European fintech stack, Omnius occupies a critical but overlooked position: the vendor that lets faster companies stay fast, and slower ones move at all.

Embat

Embat is a European fintech platform built for the era when payments moved beyond the checkout. Founded on the principle that modern businesses need payment infrastructure that speaks their language—not the other way around—Embat offers a composable payments stack designed for developers and merchants who refuse to settle for legacy constraints. The platform combines payment orchestration, processing, and settlement into a single, modular system. Rather than forcing clients into rigid vendor relationships, Embat lets companies plug in their preferred processors, acquirers, and gateway partners while maintaining unified visibility and control. This flexibility appeals to enterprises and merchants tired of vendor lock-in and technical debt. What sets Embat apart in the crowded European payments landscape is its developer-first design philosophy. The company recognizes that payments sit at the intersection of multiple systems—loyalty, inventory, subscriptions, marketplaces—and builds its API architecture accordingly. This contrasts sharply with older payment solutions that treat payments as an isolated transaction layer rather than a core business platform. Embat occupies a distinct position between monolithic payment processors and lightweight API providers. It's built for companies that have outgrown commodity payment gateways but don't want to stitch together five different vendors to get what they need. In the increasingly competitive European fintech market, Embat represents the modern infrastructure play: solving real operational complexity for merchants and enterprises through intelligent, flexible payment technology.

Founded 2021

Moneyhub

Open banking's promise — that financial data, properly used, can help people make better decisions — has been articulated by hundreds of companies. Moneyhub has spent longer than most actually delivering it. Founded in Bristol in 2014, it built one of the UK's first and most comprehensive open banking platforms, aggregating financial accounts, pension data, and property values into a unified financial picture that gives users — and the institutions serving them — a genuinely complete view of financial health. Its B2B platform powers the open banking and financial wellness features of major UK employers, financial advice firms, and pension providers, white-labelling its data aggregation and analytics capabilities under their brands. The pensions integration is particularly significant — Moneyhub connects to pension providers alongside bank accounts, giving users visibility into their retirement savings alongside their current financial position. That breadth of financial data coverage — beyond the current account focus of most open banking platforms — is a genuine differentiator. In the UK open banking ecosystem, where the FCA's consumer duty requirements are pushing financial institutions to demonstrate they understand their customers' broader financial circumstances, Moneyhub's comprehensive data view is becoming infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.

Founded 2014

Enable Banking

Most open banking aggregators want your data. That is the business model: connect to the banks, pull the transactions, store them, enrich them, and sell the enriched product back. Enable Banking built the opposite. The company describes itself as the postman of your data — it moves financial information from the bank to the customer's application and does not retain, process, or build models on what passes through. For a fintech that considers its transaction data a competitive asset, or a customer with strict data residency requirements, that neutrality is the entire pitch. Joonas Tomperi and Fedor Tyurin founded the company in Espoo in 2019, at the point where PSD2 had legally opened European bank APIs but had not made them usable. Each bank interpreted the standard differently, each shipped its own authentication quirks, and each updated on its own schedule. The regulation created the right; someone still had to build the plumbing. Enable Banking started with Finland and the Nordics and expanded outward, and now connects to more than 2,700 banks across 30 European countries through a single PSD2-compliant API — account information from all of them, and payment initiation from over 1,500. What makes the company genuinely unusual is its scale relative to that coverage. Enable Banking has raised roughly €600,000 in total, in a single seed round in 2022 led by Wellstreet and Forward VC, and employs somewhere between fourteen and seventeen people distributed across seven countries. Tink sold to Visa for €1.8 billion with 500 employees. TrueLayer has raised hundreds of millions. Enable Banking is covering comparable European ground with a team that would fit around one table, which says something about how much of open banking infrastructure is disciplined engineering rather than capital. The company holds its own Account Information Service Provider registration, supervised by Finland's FIN-FSA — which means other companies can build on top of its licence rather than obtaining their own. That is the model behind open-banking.io, the Danish developer tool that resells Enable Banking access at €3 per month without customers needing eIDAS certificates. It is also why Enable Banking's no-data-retention architecture matters structurally: because the platform never holds readable customer data, the companies building on it can make stronger privacy guarantees than they otherwise could. Two smaller details are revealing about who this is built for. Enable Banking runs a balanced split between business and consumer accounts — roughly half of its ten million monthly API calls come from each, where most early open banking providers targeted consumer accounts only and treated corporate banking as an afterthought. And it offers a live production environment for testing without requiring a contract, which is a small thing that tells you the company expects developers to evaluate it by using it rather than by booking a call. Tomperi now chairs the board of Fintech Finland, the national industry association.

Founded 2019

Solaris

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

Swan

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

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

Vodeno

Vodeno is a European fintech building the infrastructure layer for embedded finance—letting any company slip banking and lending directly into their product without the complexity of traditional integrations. The platform abstracts away the operational headaches of regulatory compliance, bank connectivity, and fund management that typically come with embedding financial services, making it possible for non-financial businesses to offer credit, accounts, and payments to their users almost as easily as adding a API call. What sets Vodeno apart is its focus on the operational backbone rather than the customer-facing experience. While most embedded finance platforms emphasize sleek user flows, Vodeno solves the unglamorous but critical problem: how do you actually manage the banking, settlement, and risk infrastructure when you're issuing credit to thousands of users across multiple jurisdictions? They handle the plumbing that traditional banks spent decades building. The company targets both B2B2C platforms and B2B software providers looking to monetize their customer relationships through financial products. It competes in a growing category alongside players like Marqeta and Unit, but Vodeno's European roots give it a natural advantage in navigating the continent's fragmented regulatory landscape and banking infrastructure. As embedded finance reshapes how non-financial companies interact with their customers, platforms like Vodeno are becoming essential infrastructure—sitting invisibly in the background, making finance work at speed.

Founded 2021

TrueLayer

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

Token

Token is a London-based open banking platform that sits at the intersection of infrastructure and consumer experience, making API-driven financial connectivity feel less like plumbing and more like a natural part of how money moves. Rather than asking users to log into their banks manually or hand over passwords, Token handles account aggregation and payment initiation through direct bank connections—the infrastructure most fintech apps and traditional banks should have built themselves but didn't. The company's core insight is that open banking is only useful if it actually works across borders, across device types, and across the chaos of fragmented financial systems. Token's platform standardizes this mess, letting fintechs, banks, and payment companies offer seamless experiences without getting bogged down in regional variations or legacy bank APIs that still feel like they were written in 2003. What sets Token apart in the European market is its focus on developer experience without sacrificing enterprise-grade security and compliance. While competitors offer raw API access or clunky consent flows, Token treats the entire interaction—from user authentication to transaction confirmation—as a product problem, not just a technical one. They're essentially the connective tissue that lets modern financial products actually work at scale. Token's role in fintech infrastructure means it powers an invisible layer: the moment you authorize a payment or link an account in an app that "just works," Token's orchestration is likely running underneath. That's the kind of foundational utility the ecosystem desperately needs.

Founded 2014