Fintech Startups are exploding in Europe, home to over 3500+ companies dealing with financial technology. The reason behind the massive growth and popularity of fintech startups in Europe is due to a favorable regulatory environment, open banking, advancing technologies, investor and consumer interest among many more reasons.
We bring before you the Top 10 FinTech Startups of Europe:
1. Klarna
Founders: Niklas Adalberth, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Victor Jacobsson
Founding Year: 2005
Headquarters: Stockholm
Funding received: US$ 2.1B
Investors: Sequoia Capital, TCV, FJ Labs, IVP, General Atlantic, Fabrice Grinda, Northzone, Atomico, Creandum, QED Investors, GIC, Wellington Management, DST Global, Wellcome Trust, BlackRock, Ant Group, GP Bullhound, Silver Lake, Dragoneer Investment Group, Visa and 11 other investors.
Klarna offers an e-commerce payment solutions platform for traders and buyers. It is popular for its “buy now, pay later” scheme that lets shoppers pay for retail goods over a period of installments without any interest. The platform empowers customers with the liberty to choose how and when to pay. They also provide direct payments, pay after delivery options, and installment plans. The FinTech startup is now one of Europe’s major banks and is providing better payment methods to 85 million consumers spanning over 17 countries globally. Klarna has partnered with almost 200K merchants and records over 1 million transactions per day.
2. Greensill Capital
Founders: Jason Austin and Lex Greensill
Founding Year: 2011
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 1.7B
Investors: SoftBank Vision Fund and General Atlantic
Greensill is one of the leading providers of working capital finance for enterprises and customers globally. The startup had founded the Greensill Bank that led to the creation of the world’s first Supply Chain Finance fund. It offers this Supply Chain Finance to clients across Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia and works with a cohort of banks and recognized investors to provide solid funding streams to fortify the entire process.
Greensill has delivered more than US$ 150B of capital to 8 million-plus customers and dealers in more than 175 countries in the last nine years since its inception. The startup also has offices in New York, Chicago, Miami, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Sydney, with more than 800 experts worldwide.
3. TransferWise
Founders: Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus
Founding Year: 2011
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 1.1B
Investors: SV Angel, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Kima Ventures, Seedcamp, IVP, LocalGlobe, Sapphire Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Future Fifty, ACE & Company, Mitsui & Co, IA Ventures, Fidelity, BlackRock, Valar Ventures, Max Levchin, World Innovation Lab (WiL), Baillie Gifford, Lead Edge Capital, Mosaic Ventures, JP Morgan, Vitruvian Partners, Virgin Group, Firestartr, Green Bay Ventures, The Accelerator Group, and 7 other investors.
TransferWise offers a money transfer facility enabling private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without any concealed charges. The startup runs on a very smart model ( which has now been copied by many others) which implies it doesn’t actually transfer money across borders, something that would obviously incur fees. Instead, it maintains separate containers for each currency, which it then uses to send funds from.
TransferWise has 14 offices worldwide and transfers almost US$ 5 billion every month. It has catered to over 8 million customers to date and helped them save approx. US$ 1.5 billion every year.
4. OakNorth
Founders: Joel Perlman and Rishi Khosla
Founding Year: 2015
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 1B
Investors: GIC, Future Fifty, SoftBank Vision Fund, EDBI, NIBC Bank N.V., Toscafund Asset Management, Clermont Group, Coltrane Asset Management, Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited
OakNorth is a European bank that provides business and property loans to small and medium-sized companies.
Its cutting-edge platform leverages machine learning, years of credit proficiency and massive data sets (counting unconventional and previously unavailable data) to provide borrowers a personalized credit-borrowing experience. It currently has over US$ 17B of assets under service.
5. Revolut
Founders: Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko
Founding Year: 2015
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 917M
Investors: Crowdcube, Index Ventures, Seedrs, Global Founders Capital, Seedcamp, TCV, Balderton Capital, Point Nine Capital, Draper Espirit, Future Fifty, DST Global, Ribbit Capital, Lakestar, TriplePoint Capital, GP Bullhound, Venrex Investment Management, Mastercard Start Path, Marco Valta, NJF Capital, Greyhound Capital, Yoma James Kukor, Nicole Junkermann, Ricardo Schaefer, Socii Capital and 13 other investors.
Revolut is a FinTech startup that focuses on mobile banking, card payments, money transfer and foreign exchange. It offers a prepaid debit card, currency exchange, and peer-to-peer payment facilities to its customers.
It strives to build an impartial and frictionless platform to utilize and manage money around the globe.
6. Monzo
Founders: Gary Dolman, Jason Bates, Jonas Huckestein, Paul Rippon and Tom Blomfield
Founding Year: 2015
Headquarters: London
Funding received: £384.7M
Investors: Y Combinator, Accel, Crowdcube, General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Future Fifty, Passion Capital, Upscale, Goodwater Capital, Jeremy Yap, Reference Capital, Kingsley Advani, Yoma James Kukor, Orange Ventures, Reece Chowdhry, Stripe, Latitude, Blue Wire Capital and 11 other investors.
Monzo Bank Ltd is an online European bank that also gives its customers access to an assortment of products and services. Monzo was one of the initial, among multiple new app-based challenger banks in the UK. One can easily do payments with the Monzo card anywhere in the world, for free.
No costs are added to the exchange rate. Cash withdrawals from an ATM are fee-free in the European Economic Area (EEA). For other nations, you can draw £200 for free every 30 days. After that, you will be charged 3%.
7. Checkout.com
Founders: Guillaume Pousaz
Founding Year: 2012
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 380M
Investors: Insight Partners, GIC, Coatue, DST Global, Endeavor Catalyst, Blossom Capital
Checkout.com is an API-based platform providing online payment solutions aiming to improve the user’s checkout experience. Its platform offers direct access to domestic processing across different payment methods and regions, counting all the leading credit and debit cards, online banking, PayPal, Apple Pay and other eWallets. This is achieved via an incorporated and integrated platform that also provides fraud supervision tools, analytics and inclusive reporting features.
It currently has 13 offices globally including in cities such as, London, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore among many more.
8. Raisin
Founders: Frank Freund, Michael Stephan and Tamaz Georgadze
Founding Year: 2012
Headquarters: Berlin
Funding received: US$ 206M
Investors: Index Ventures, Goldman Sachs, FJ Labs, Fabrice Grinda, Thrive Capital, DN Capital, btov Partners, Ribbit Capital, PayPal Ventures, Orange Ventures, Avala Capital, Latitude, Tom Stafford, Larnabel Ventures, Binomial Ventures.
Raisin is a savings and investment marketplace that connects retail clienteles with banks wanting to increase their deposit reach. The startup’s aim is to provide customers the best interest rates to ensure a smooth investment process via one single platform. Its platform gives access to high-class savings products from all over Europe.
9. Qonto
Founders: Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi
Founding Year: 2016
Headquarters: Paris
Funding received: US$ 151.5M
Investors: Tencent Holdings, Alven, DST Global, European Investment Bank, Valar Ventures, The Family, Taavet Hinrikus, Ingo Uytdehaage
Qonto is a challenger/neo bank (challenger banks are small, recently created retail banks in the European region that compete directly with the longer-established banks in the country and focus on providing personalized banking experiences to its users) that offers easy, efficient and transparent business banking methods to freelancers and SMEs (small and medium enterprises).
It leverages technology, sophisticated design and first-class customer support to achieve the same. Almost 50K business customers are now a part of Qonto’s ecosystem.
10. GoCardless
Founders: Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson
Founding Year: 2011
Headquarters: London
Funding received: US$ 122.3M
Investors: Y Combinator, Accel, SV Angel, GV, Salesforce Ventures, Balderton Capital, Adams Street Partners, Future Fifty, Passion Capital, ACE & Company, Notion, Start Fund, Tom Hulme, Axcel Partners
GoCardless is a renowned trailblazer in the field of recurring payments. Its comprehensive payments network and technology platform provide easy payment methods to regular customers to pay wherever they want to by Direct Debit (a practice where the payee directly withdraws money from the payers’ bank account). It has partnered with more than 40K businesses globally, from MNCs to SMBs.
The startup handles over US$ 10B of payments each year. It has offices in the UK, France, Australia and Germany.
We try our best to fact check and bring the best, well-researched and non-plagiarized content to you. Please let us know
-if there are any discrepancies in any of our published stories,
-how we can improve,
-what stories you would like us to cover and what information you are looking for, in the comments section below or through our contact form! We look forward to your feedback and thank you for stopping by!
Next Top 10 Greentech Startups Story.
[…] Top 10 FinTech Startups of Europe […]
[…] of the Alibaba group. It begs the question: What are the key factors that led to the rise of the FinTech startup […]