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Hello fintech friends,
Arguably, this week’s biggest news story is Revolut’s long outage. The neobank was offline for much of the day this past Tuesday, and it wasn’t just the app — most of the bank’s services were disrupted, including card payments, transfers, crypto and more. The outage was caused by a failure at Google Cloud’s London data centre, raising questions about why Revolut couldn’t maintain its services when part of its cloud infrastructure went down.
While Google Cloud recovered after several hours, Revolut took considerably longer to get back to normal. Customers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, including those travelling overseas, reported issues. Revolut is now reviewing how to reduce the impact of future third-party outages.
In July, the UK designated Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft and Oracle as Critical Third Parties to the financial sector, bringing them under direct regulatory oversight. Just three months later, Google’s outage provides an early test of this new framework. Meanwhile, Monzo, the UK’s largest neobank by customer numbers, already has a second cloud provider in place and escaped the disruption.
This all comes at a time when Europe is questioning its reliance on American payments companies. Yet that dependence extends beyond Visa and Mastercard to American cloud providers, whose reach goes far beyond the financial services sector.
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Please find another week of fintech news below!
— Matt Jones
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The Rundown
🏦 M&A
Payward, the owner of Kraken, agreed to buy Saldo Bank, a Lithuanian-licensed digital bank. The deal gives Payward an EU banking licence for deposits, loans, cards and SEPA payments.
The European Central Bank authorised UniCredit to raise its stake in Commerzbank above 30%.
Intuit agreed to buy Sequence, a billing and revenue-management platform.
UK expense-management firm Webexpenses, backed by Tenzing, merged with Australian finance-automation company Zudello.
Transaction-banking software firm Omikron, backed by Flex Capital, combined with Vienna treasury-software maker COPS to sell one stack for corporate finance teams.
🚀 Product Launches
Checkout.com expanded into in-person payments, starting in the UK and EEA, with Mollie supplying the payment terminals.
Mastercard launched the Mastercard Global Money Platform with BVNK (acquired by Mastercard earlier this year), giving banks and fintechs one API to hold, convert, pay out and spend fiat and stablecoins, with payouts in more than 40 currencies planned for 2027.
Germany’s Sparkassen, a network of independent regional savings banks, began offering crypto trading inside the Sparkasse app, with DekaBank running the service and holding the assets alongside Börse Stuttgart.
Deutsche Bank launched PrivatMandat Xperience, a fully digital discretionary portfolio service run by its own managers rather than algorithms. The service starts from €500, with savings plans from €1 a month and annual management fees of 0.65% to 0.75%.
Qivalis, the euro stablecoin venture backed by 37 European banks in 15 countries, received authorisation as an electronic money institution from De Nederlandsche Bank, and said issuance would begin within months once its MiCA white paper is published.
Western Union chose London-based Noah to supply the on-chain treasury and licences behind its Receiver Redirect service, which uses Western Union's USDPT stablecoin on Solana to pay out in more than 200 countries and 60 currencies.
Stripe launched stablecoin card issuing in the EU, and expanded Global Payouts to send stablecoin payouts to 160 markets and local-currency payouts to more than 100.
💸 Fundraises
Lyon-based Dougs, an online accounting firm that bundles company formation, payroll, invoicing and business banking, raised €50m in a growth round led by existing investor Expedition Growth Capital.
Hyperlayer, raised £19.5m in a Series A2 round led by existing backer Flintlock Capital, with Mouro Capital and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments.
Stockholm-based Matters emerged from stealth with $5m of pre-seed funding led by Swedish angel Jakob Johansson, with former Klarna COO Knut Frängsmyr among the backers.
Norwegian open-banking firm Neonomics raised $4m from existing shareholders after a restructuring that roughly halved its cost base.
Zurich payment-operations firm Rivero, took a strategic investment of undisclosed size from Elevator Ventures, the venture arm of Raiffeisen Bank International, to expand in Central and Eastern Europe.
🏛️ Policy & Regulation
The Competition and Markets Authority proposed a conduct requirement forcing Apple to give rival wallets access to the iPhone's NFC chip.
ECB president Christine Lagarde committed the Eurosystem to a 12-month internal digital euro pilot in the second half of 2027.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C-70/25, brought by a Polish phishing victim who lost about €700, that a bank must refund an unauthorised payment promptly even where it alleges gross negligence — they may recover the money afterwards if it proves the negligence.
The FCA's Jessica Rusu asked general-purpose AI providers to add consistent disclaimers to financial information their models generate, after finding that four in five younger and inexperienced investors have used AI to help with investing.
Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, told the Riksdag's finance committee that developments in the payments market have brought the question of a digital krona back into focus, three years after the e-krona project was shelved.
FINMA approved Switzerland's first spot bitcoin ETF for retail investors.
🗂️ Other News
A Google Cloud outage in London disrupted Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays alongside Rightmove, Royal Mail and NHS England.
ING Germany's online banking went down for hours the same morning as the above outage — in what the bank called an unrelated technical fault.
UK Chancellor John Healey signalled higher taxes on banks in the 28 October Budget, with an increase in the 3% bank surcharge under discussion (reported in the Guardian).
Wise reported its Q2 results with 12.5 million active customers (up 20% on 2025).
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The FT found that digital challengers are reaching profit ahead of other fintechs by filling the SME lending gap left by banks retreating from the segment.
An Allensbach survey for the Initiative Deutsche Zahlungssysteme found that 55% of Germans have never heard of Wero and 5% have used it, while 54% have heard of the digital euro — 7% say they would probably use it.
Sifted reported that Revolut, Lendable and Starling are each building their own "transactional foundation models" trained on payments data.
Fun Stuff
1. What was the UK’s original contactless payment limit in 2007?
A) £5
B) £10
C) £20
D) £25
2. In what year did the euro first become a currency?
A) 1992
B) 1999
C) 2002
D) 2004
3. When did the UK launch Faster Payments?
A) 1998
B) 2003
C) 2008
D) 2013
4. Which of these countries uses the euro without being an EU member or having a formal monetary agreement with the EU?
A) Andorra
B) Monaco
C) Montenegro
D) San Marino
Answers: B, B, C, C
Thanks everyone for reading. Have a great day and see you next week.
