Country focus: Germany’s top fintech startups to watch
Germany is one of the European countries that homes a number of successful Fintechs. FinTech Magazine takes a look at the three companies disrupting the industry today.
N26
Disruptive challenger bank, N26, was founded in 2013 by Valentin Stalf and Maximillian Tayenthal; the N26 Mastercard was officially launched in 2015. Speed, ease of use and customer centricity define the N26 banking experience, where customers can access every aspect of their finances through their mobile, removing the need for desktops, laptops and banks altogether. N26 users can sign up for an account in minutes; “no paperwork, no fuss”, as it explains. Users will receive no fees on card payments abroad, they can control account security through the app and they are able to set aside funds or set out specific financial goals through ‘Spaces’ sub accounts and use services such as Apple Pay. Little wonder, then, that it boasts a customer base of more than 3.5 million people across 24 European countries.
Fidor Bank
One of the older challenger banks in the fintech space, Fidor was founded in Munich in 2009 with a view to returning the development of products into customer hands. It’s slogan: “Banking with Friends," seeks to represent a greater relationship between customers and bank employees, as well as the wider Fidor community. Today, Fidor has over 310,000 active members and most notably won the "Global Growth Company" by The World Economic Forum and Celent Banking Model in 2015.
Fidor Bank shared in a statement that it will remove its product from the UK following the Brexit deadline.
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Penta
Penta is a bank that specialises in expense management, automated accounting and company cards for startups and SMEs. It has a number of additional benefits, such as: downloadable receipts attached to transactions; sub accounts for users to split cash; cash flow analysis and external API access. In addition to this, the bank provides the Penta Marketplace, which offers deals from partners. Penta was founded by Aleksandar Orlic, Igor Kuschnir, Jessica Holzbach, Lav Odorovic, Luka Ivicevic, Sir Gabriel Holbach and Sir, in 2016, as each of them had experienced struggles with business banking at one time or another, often relating to poor interfaces, poor customer support and inefficient operating systems. First launched in Berlin in 2017, the bank has gone on to power over 16,000 businesses, as well raising over US$11mn from VCs and Business Angels.
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