Europe’s open banking revolution is accelerating, and Payment Expert spotlights the five startups building the infrastructure redefining how money moves across the continent
The open banking market has reshaped how financial data flows between institutions, businesses, and consumers – and Europe has been at the forefront of this movement.
Regulatory frameworks like Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) have forced banks to open their infrastructure to third-party providers, creating the conditions for a new generation of fintech companies to build on top of them.
The results are visible in the numbers: per Open Banking Ltd (OBL), the UK alone recorded 29.9 million open banking payments per month as of July 2025, while the number of open banking users across Europe has risen to 63.8 million – a five-fold increase since 2020.
Below, Payment Expert spotlights five European startups leading the open banking charge.
1. GoCardless
Founded: 2011
HQ: London
CEO: Hiroki Takeuchi
GoCardless built its reputation on direct debit infrastructure before making open banking central to its proposition. Total group revenue reached £160.9m in FY25, up 22% year-on-year, with payment volumes doubling to £79.2bn partly driven by the acquisition of open banking provider Nuapay in September 2024.
Instant Bank Pay, its account-to-account product, now sits alongside commercial variable recurring payments and outbound payments, positioning it as an end-to-end bank payment provider. The pending acquisition by Dutch fintech Mollie – announced in December 2025 and expected to close mid-2026 – will create a combined business serving over 350,000 European merchants.
GoCardless operates as both a payment institution and open banking provider, leveraging licences under PSD2 to initiate payments directly from bank accounts. Its model combines transaction-based revenues from pay-by-bank flows with recurring income from its core direct debit infrastructure, allowing it to monetise both one-off and repeat payments.
The integration of Nuapay has expanded its capabilities into real-time account-to-account payments and bank connectivity across Europe, positioning the company further up the payments stack. Rather than acting purely as an API provider, GoCardless is increasingly operating as a full-stack bank payment processor, competing with card networks and PSPs in checkout environments while maintaining its roots in recurring billing.
2. Token.io
Founded: 2015
HQ: London
CEO: Todd Clyde
Token.io is infrastructure-first and white-label by design, built for banks and payment companies that need to embed Pay by Bank without building their own rails.
Token.io provides access to 567 million verified bank accounts across the UK and Europe via a single API, with clients including HSBC, BNP Paribas, Mastercard, ACI Worldwide, Nuvei, and Paysafe.
HSBC became a strategic investor in June 2025, deepening a partnership that began in 2019 and powers HSBC’s open oayments solution.
Token.io operates as both an FCA-authorised PISP in the UK and a BaFin-registered entity in Germany, giving partners a faster regulatory route to market without building their own licences. Its white-label model positions it as the invisible infrastructure layer beneath client-facing products. For banks like HSBC, that means replacing card acceptance with direct bank-to-bank flows; for PSPs like Mastercard and Nuvei, it means adding open banking without the overhead of proprietary connectivity.
3. TrueLayer
Founded: 2016
HQ: London
CEO: Francesco Simoneschi
TrueLayer is a volume leader in European pay by bank, having raised funding from investors including Stripe, Tiger Global, Tencent, and Temasek. The acquisition of Nordic provider Zimpler, completed in March 2026, brought its combined network to over 20 million users across 22 countries, adding coverage in Sweden and Finland via the Swish payment rail.
Early 2026 also saw TrueLayer launch pay by bank with Amazon, eBay, and Bet365 – merchant partnerships that signal how far account-to-account payments have moved into mainstream e-commerce. Profitability remains the outstanding challenge, but the scale now being reached suggests unit economics are beginning to turn.
As an FCA-authorised PISP and AISP, TrueLayer generates revenue through transaction fees on pay-in and payout flows across its network. Unlike white-label providers, it runs a branded network model where merchants integrate TrueLayer directly at checkout, placing it in competition with card networks and PSPs rather than sitting invisibly behind them. The Zimpler acquisition extends those network effects into the Nordics, while its Stripe backing gives it a distribution advantage that pure-play open banking providers cannot easily replicate.
4. Volt.io
Founded: 2019
HQ: London
CEO: Steffen Vollert
Volt.io‘s thesis is that open banking payments are a global opportunity constrained by local fragmentation. Having raised $60m in a Series B in 2023 led by IVP and CommerzVentures at a valuation of over $350m, it is building a network-of-networks that aggregates domestic real-time rails – including Faster Payments, SEPA Instant, Pix, and PayTo – across 30+ markets in the UK, EU, and Australia into a single API.
Its client base spans payment orchestrators, iGaming operators, and crypto platforms, high-volume use cases where real-time settlement matters most. Volt partnered with Sumsub in 2025 for greater payment verification processes.
Volt functions as a payment institution rather than a pure API aggregator, holding its own licences to initiate and settle payments directly across its active markets on a transaction-fee basis. Its commercial proposition is built on cross-border consistency, where most European providers optimise for depth in a single market, Volt offers payment initiation across fragmented domestic schemes through one integration, removing the need for high-volume international merchants to manage multiple open banking providers across jurisdictions.
5. Yapily
Founded: 2017
HQ: London
CEO: Stefano Vaccino
Yapily is the connectivity layer that lets businesses build on open banking without managing bank-by-bank integrations directly. Raising $69.4m in total funding from backers including HV Capital, Lakestar, and Sapphire Ventures, it connects to over 2,000 banks across 19 markets and reached profitability in 2025.
Yapily’s Google partnership, announced in October 2025, embedded Yapily’s API inside Google‘s bank account verification service for business customers across Europe. Partners also include Adyen, Allica Bank, Intuit QuickBooks, Pleo, and Ant Group, with a use case base spanning payments, lending, accounting, and tax compliance.
Another FCA-authorised AISP and PISP, Yapily generates revenue through API usage fees charged to businesses connecting to its bank network for data access and payment initiation. Its model is explicitly infrastructure-facing, with no consumer products or branded checkout experiences. This makes it a horizontal enabler across the payments stack rather than a vertical competitor within it.
If you are interested in featuring in Payment Expert’s Spotlight series, get in touch with the team today by emailing News Editor Louis Thompsett at [email protected], or Senior Media Sales Executive Annabel Selvadurai at [email protected].
