payment initiation

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

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

Pay.nl

Pay.nl is a Dutch payment processor built for the complexity of modern commerce. Rather than forcing merchants into a one-size-fits-all payment flow, it offers a modular approach where acquirers, payment methods, and risk tools snap together like building blocks. This flexibility appeals to mid-market retailers and platform operators who've outgrown off-the-shelf solutions but don't have the resources to build from scratch. The company positions itself as the pragmatic middle ground in European payments. While fintechs chase consumer flashiness and traditional PSPs move at legacy speed, Pay.nl focuses on the unglamorous reality of merchant operations: payment routing, multi-currency settlement, real-time reconciliation, and developer experience. Its API-first architecture means integrations take weeks instead of quarters. Pay.nl operates across the full payment stack—card acquiring, alternative payment methods, tokenization, subscription billing—but treats them as components rather than marketing bullets. This modular thinking extends to risk management and compliance, which the company bundles without overhead. Within Europe's crowded payments landscape, Pay.nl competes less on consumer reach and more on merchant control. It's the choice for companies that care about payment economics and operational efficiency rather than brand building. Its role in the broader ecosystem is to mature the middle market, proving that European merchants don't need either a tech giant's infrastructure or a startup's rough edges.

Founded 2007

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

Wero

Wero is a pan-European digital wallet built on the back of instant payments infrastructure, letting you send money across borders as easily as you'd split a coffee with a friend. The service is backed by major European banks and payment networks, so it carries the weight of established financial institutions without the friction they're usually known for. It positions itself as a genuinely European alternative to the US-dominated payment apps—no geopolitical complications, just European banking rails doing what they should have been doing all along. The app focuses on person-to-person transfers, merchant payments, and basic wallet functionality, all tied to your existing bank account rather than a proprietary balance. What sets Wero apart is its foundation in real-time payments infrastructure and bank partnerships, giving it legitimacy and reach that pure fintech startups struggle to achieve. It's not trying to be a challenger bank or investment platform—it's building something narrower but potentially deeper: a payment layer that feels native to Europe rather than imported from Silicon Valley. As European instant payment networks mature and regulations push toward open banking, Wero represents the infrastructure play that could become quietly essential.

Founded 2021

Inxy

Inxy is a European open banking platform that lets businesses tap into customer financial data through APIs, turning fragmented banking relationships into a single source of truth. Rather than asking customers to manually upload statements or reconnect accounts every few months, Inxy maintains a live, permission-based link to real bank data—making it effortless for fintechs, lenders, and SaaS platforms to build smarter underwriting, risk assessment, and financial insights on top of their core products. The platform sits squarely in the infrastructure layer, designed for teams building financial experiences rather than consumers managing their own money. What sets Inxy apart in a crowded open banking space is its focus on simplicity and reliability. While competitors often require technical gymnastics or lengthy integrations, Inxy's API is direct and frictionless. It handles the complexity of PSD2 compliance, account connectivity, and data standardization behind the scenes. The result: lenders can make faster, more informed decisions; embedded finance platforms can offer instant credit lines; accounting tools can automatically reconcile transactions. Inxy is fundamentally changing how financial data moves between banks and the applications that need it most, making it an essential building block for modern European fintech.

Founded 2020

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

Enable Banking

Enable Banking is an open banking infrastructure platform that simplifies how financial institutions and fintech companies connect to bank APIs across Europe. Rather than building custom integrations for dozens of different banking networks, companies tap into Enable Banking's unified layer—a single API that handles the complexity of connecting to thousands of European banks with varying technical standards and regulatory requirements. The platform abstracts away the fragmentation that has made open banking adoption slower than it should be. While PSD2 and other regulations opened up bank data and payments, the actual implementation remains messy: each bank interprets the standards differently, each has its own API quirks, and each requires separate integration work. Enable Banking eliminates that friction. Their core value sits in the infrastructure layer—they're infrastructure for infrastructure. Fintechs use it to access account data, initiate payments, and verify customer identity across European banks without maintaining individual relationships with each one. Banks use it to expose their APIs in a standardized way without rebuilding their legacy systems. In a market where most open banking plays focus on consumer-facing applications, Enable Banking takes the plumbing approach. They're to open banking what Stripe is to payments: making the invisible layers work so others can build on top of them. This positions them as a critical enabler for the entire European fintech ecosystem rather than a consumer-facing application.

Founded 2018

Mangopay

Mangopay sits at the intersection of payments infrastructure and marketplace complexity. Rather than selling fintech features individually, the company tackles the full stack problem: how do you actually move money between dozens of parties—buyers, sellers, platforms, creators—when everyone needs different settlement rules and nobody trusts a stranger with their cash. Founded in 2011, Mangopay is a Brussels-based powerhouse that specializes in payout infrastructure for marketplaces, platforms, and creator economies. The platform handles the messy reality of modern commerce: a freelancer in Barcelona getting paid by a client in London, a marketplace taking commission, a payment processor taking a fee, and a tax authority wanting its cut—all simultaneously, all reconciled, all compliant. What sets Mangopay apart is its pragmatism. While most payment processors treat multi-party transactions as an edge case, Mangopay designed around it from the start. The company's white-label approach means you barely know it's there—you integrate their APIs, they handle the regulatory nightmare, and your users see your brand. That's the opposite of fintech theater. The European fintech world has fractured into specialists: payments here, compliance there, ledger systems somewhere else. Mangopay refuses that fragmentation. In a landscape where payment orchestration feels trendy and new, Mangopay has been solving it at scale for over a decade.

Founded 2011

Bankin

Bankin is a French fintech that connects you to your money across multiple banks through a single app. Rather than juggling five different banking apps, Bankin aggregates all your accounts—checking, savings, investments, crypto—into one place where you can see your full financial picture. The company doesn't hold your money or replace your banks; it's an overlay that reads your data securely and gives you control over what happens next. What sets Bankin apart is its focus on switching: unlike most aggregators that just show you balances, Bankin helps you move money between banks, find better rates, and actually leave a bank if you want to. It's positioned somewhere between a personal finance dashboard and a financial comparison tool, but with genuine switching capability baked in. The app works across Europe, though strongest in France and the Nordics, and has built a loyal base of power users who genuinely use it to manage their money rather than just peek at their balance. In a landscape crowded with robo-advisors and neobanks offering me-too features, Bankin solves a more mundane but more urgent problem: most people still bank with multiple institutions and hate managing them. The company has positioned itself as the glue holding fragmented European banking together, and that simplicity—aggregation plus switching—gives it a unique role in the open banking revolution.

Founded 2013

Fintecture

Fintecture is building the plumbing that makes open banking actually work for merchants and platforms across Europe. Rather than forcing businesses to cobble together fragmented payment APIs and banking connectors, Fintecture consolidates access to bank accounts and payment rails across the continent into a single integration point. The company's core offering is elegantly straightforward: a unified API that lets merchants initiate payments directly from customer bank accounts without managing dozens of individual bank connections. This sits somewhere between traditional payment gateways and the messy reality of banking infrastructure—it handles the complexity of navigating different banking standards, regulatory environments, and technical protocols across European markets so businesses don't have to. What sets Fintecture apart is its focus on the merchant experience rather than the bank experience. While most open banking platforms were built to satisfy regulators, Fintecture designed its product assuming developers actually want to use it. The company operates across 30+ European countries and integrates with over 4,000 banks, which means a single merchant can reach customers wherever they bank without building country-by-country integrations. In a landscape crowded with both traditional payment processors and newer open banking specialists, Fintecture occupies a distinct middle ground—not replacing card networks, but offering an alternative rails that's cheaper for merchants, more transparent for customers, and increasingly difficult for incumbents to ignore.

Founded 2017

Anyfin

Anyfin sits at the intersection of fintech and banking infrastructure, solving a problem most people don't know they have: buried in their financial life are loans and credit products scattered across multiple institutions, often at unfavorable terms. The Stockholm-based platform aggregates these fragmented debts and refinances them into a single, optimized package—think of it as a financial consolidation layer that actually works. Rather than building another neobank or another loan origination system, Anyfin focuses on the underserved middle ground: helping customers reclaim control of debt they already have, often saving thousands in the process. The company positions itself as a counterweight to the traditional banking industry's opacity around refinancing, where customers rarely know whether they're getting a fair deal. What sets Anyfin apart in the crowded Nordic fintech scene is its technology-first approach to credit decisioning and underwriting, combined with a genuine mission to democratize access to better loan terms. It operates across multiple Scandinavian markets and has built partnerships with traditional financial institutions who recognize that Anyfin's platform actually drives better customer outcomes rather than cannibalizing their business. The company represents a new breed of fintech that doesn't try to replace banks—it intelligently sits between customers and the banking system, extracting value through transparency and automation in an industry built on opacity.

Founded 2017