Payments startup ecosystem
We track 70 organisations in this sector across 6+ countries.
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Flywire
Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW) is a global payments-enablement and software company founded in Valencia as peerTransfer, simplifying high-value, complex payment flows in education, healthcare and travel across 240+ countries. Corporate HQ is now Boston with a Spanish product hub in Valencia. IPO on Nasdaq (FLYW) in 2021.
ForActive
ForActive, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Wrocław, develops a cloud-based business management app for independent personal trainers, coaches and fitness instructors. The platform lets professionals sell memberships, class packages and one-off sessions while automating payments, attendance tracking and client communication, with recurring billing, automated reminders and QR-based check-ins. It runs on a pay-as-you-go model with no fixed subscription fee.
FUTURUM Payments Georgia 2026 (June 2026)
A one-day industry gathering at the Paragraph Tabori (Autograph Collection) in Tbilisi focused on payment infrastructure, cross-border settlements, acquiring, banking integrations, stablecoin payments and compliance. The format includes a main stage, roundtable sessions, a networking lounge and a VIP dinner, drawing payment providers, banks, fintech startups, crypto businesses, investors and regulators.
GoCardless
GoCardless is a London-based fintech founded in 2011 that specialises in collecting recurring bank-to-bank payments, processing Direct Debit and open banking payments for businesses across Europe, North America and Australia. It reached unicorn status in 2022 and handles tens of billions of dollars in payment volume each year for tens of thousands of merchants.
Guillaume Pousaz
Founder and CEO of Checkout.com, the payments processor he bootstrapped before it became one of Europe's most valuable fintechs. A Swiss entrepreneur based in London, he is among the wealthiest people in UK tech.
Handpoint
Handpoint is an embedded payments technology company with an office in Reykjavik, Iceland, alongside offices in the UK, US, and Spain, that helps SaaS businesses and financial institutions build payment solutions covering card terminals, face-to-face payments across North America, Europe, and South Africa, an e-commerce suite for Europe, and real-time payments data via its APIs.
iyzico
iyzico is an Istanbul-founded payment processor and merchant-acquiring platform that became Turkey's most visible fintech exit when it was acquired by Naspers-owned PayU in 2019 for around USD 165 million, at the time one of the largest fintech deals in Turkish history. Founded in 2013 by Barbaros Özbugutu and Tahsin Isin, iyzico built a developer-friendly API stack for accepting card payments, recurring billing, marketplace split payments, and fraud detection in the Turkish market, and layered a 'buy now, pay later' product on top that became a default installment option for thousands of Turkish e-commerce merchants. Even inside PayU, iyzico continues to operate as the Turkish merchant payments brand and has expanded into additional financial services, making it a canonical reference for how a CEE/MENA fintech can convert a tough local regulatory environment into a defensible commercial wedge.
Joseph Cleetus
Business Transformation Manager at Lulu Financial Holdings, focused on fintech transformation and cross-border payments. He is an announced speaker at Eurasia Tech Week 2026 in Istanbul.
Keepz
QR-based payments fintech founded in Tbilisi in 2023. Keepz enables merchants to accept payments via Apple Pay, Google Pay, bank cards, open banking, and cryptocurrency without requiring customers to download an app. The company was the first in Georgia to obtain an open banking licence and, in December 2024, helped Georgia become one of the first countries to enable tax payments via digital assets. It has onboarded over 20,000 merchants and is expanding into Turkey and Italy.
Klarna
Klarna is a Swedish fintech company that pioneered the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) model globally. Founded in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth, and Victor Jacobsson, Klarna started by offering online shoppers in Sweden a way to purchase goods on invoice (pay after delivery). Over the next decade, the company expanded across Europe and beyond, becoming a dominant online payments provider. As of 2021, Klarna was Europe’s highest-valued private tech company at $45.6 billion, reflecting meteoric growth fueled by consumers’ appetite for installment payments. Klarna’s app and services allow users to split purchases into interest-free installments or pay later, and it partners with over 450,000 retailers worldwide, including global brands like H&M, IKEA, and Nike. The company has over 150 million users across 45 countries and handled $80 billion in transaction volume in 2021. Klarna’s journey, however, has seen dramatic swings: after reaching a $45B valuation in mid-2021, a combination of rising interest rates and tech market downturn led to a downround in 2022, cutting its valuation to $6.7 billion (an 85% drop). The company restructured, laying off 10% of its staff, and refocused on profitability. By 2023, Klarna returned to profit and saw renewed growth, aided by expanding beyond BNPL into a full shopping app with price comparison, loyalty features, and banking services (Klarna obtained a banking license in Europe in 2017). In 2025, Klarna reportedly delayed an IPO amid market volatility but ultimately went public in September 2025, raising $1.37 billion. Despite valuation fluctuations, Klarna remains the global leader in BNPL, with a strong brand among Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Its journey from a small Stockholm startup to a financial giant serving 65 million customers (2025) at one point valued at $75 billion exemplifies the rise (and resiliency) of Europe’s fintech sector.
Kristo Käärmann
Co-founder and CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise), the cross-border payments company he started with Taavet Hinrikus to cut the cost of international money transfers. He took Wise public via a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange.
Mastercard Start Path
Mastercard Start Path is Mastercard's flagship global startup engagement programme, launched in 2014 to connect high-growth fintechs with Mastercard's commercial network, mentorship and co-innovation resources. Unlike traditional equity accelerators it takes no equity and charges no fees; selected startups gain access to Mastercard's ecosystem of 150M+ merchants, thousands of banking partners and billions of cards. Dublin — Mastercard's sole European Technology Hub, with 2,000+ staff — anchors the programme's European engagement. The programme runs rolling cohorts of five to fifteen startups across specialised tracks including Emerging Fintech, Acceptance, Blockchain & Digital Assets, Open Finance, Small Business, Security Solutions and the newest Agentic Commerce track (added 2026). Since inception it has engaged more than 500 startups from 60+ countries, whose alumni have raised over $25bn in follow-on capital. Notable alumni include unicorns Revolut and Thought Machine (UK), Razorpay and Zeta (India) and Airwallex, alongside European fintechs such as Doconomy (Sweden) and Irish fraud-prevention startup Urban Fox.
Michał Olszewski
Co-founder and Partner at Movens Capital. 17+ years in venture capital, innovation, and fintech. CEO of SkyCash (2009–2013), scaling it into one of Poland's leading mobile payment platforms. Co-founded Business Angel Seedfund and LBA, among Poland's first organised angel networks. Focus at Movens on fintech, payments, and enterprise SaaS.
Midas
Midas (Midas Software GmbH) is a Berlin-based fintech building infrastructure for tokenised real-world assets and composable on-chain investment products. It lets strategy managers turn institutional investment strategies into compliant, blockchain-based tokens (mTokens) that aim to give investors transparency, instant redemptions, and composability across DeFi protocols. Its first product, mTBILL, tokenises US Treasury bills as an ERC-20 token so holders can earn yield on-chain. The company describes itself as a German, BaFin-regulated and MiCA-compliant entity.
Mollie
Payments infrastructure provider helping EU businesses accept local and global methods. Mollie is a startup based in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the growth stage. The company operates in the Payments, Fintech space. Learn more at their website.
Money20/20
Organizer of Money20/20 Europe, a flagship fintech and payments conference in Amsterdam. Money20/20 is an event organiser based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Organising events in the Events, FinTech, Payments, Financial Services space.
Money20/20 Europe 2026
The premier global event for the fintech and financial services industry in Europe, held annually in Amsterdam, showcasing innovation and future trends in payments and commerce.
Money20/20 Europe 2027
Money20/20 Europe 2027 runs 8-10 June at the RAI Amsterdam, billed as Europe's number one fintech event. The three-day event brings together leaders from banks, payments, tech, startups, retail, policy and crypto, with about one in three attendees at C-suite level.
Montonio
Montonio is an Estonian payments and post-checkout platform for e-commerce merchants. Through a single API and dashboard it offers open-banking bank-transfer payments, card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay, BLIK and Buy-Now-Pay-Later financing, alongside post-checkout tools such as shipping labels, parcel tracking, returns and refunds. The company serves merchants across the Baltics and Poland, aiming to be a unified checkout solution for the region. Its regulated payment-institution entity is registered in Lithuania while the company operates from Tallinn.
NextGen Payments & RegTech Forum (October 2026)
The 25th edition of the NextGen Payments & RegTech Forum is a one-day senior-executive fintech conference held at the Athens Marriott Hotel. Through keynotes, panels, roundtables and one-to-one meetings it covers instant and real-time payments, account-to-account transactions, digital wallets, open banking, the Digital Euro, embedded finance, fraud prevention and regulatory technology across Greece and Europe.
