Who really holds Europe's fintech licences
We rebuilt the official EBA and ESMA registers into one filterable index: 1,921 licensed fintech entities across the EEA (2,654 including the UK). The raw, register-sourced data tells a story most industry commentary misses — about Germany's sudden rise, about Lithuania, about passporting, and about how much of "European" fintech is licensed Silicon Valley.
By Mikolaj Slezak · Published , updated
The map: 1,921 licensed entities, four licence types
Counting only full authorisations (no agents, no exemptions), the EEA's fintech licence landscape looks like this: 1,015 payment institutions (PI), 428 e-money institutions (EMI), 349 MiCA crypto-asset service providers (CASP) and 129 registered AISPs — sourced from the EBA PSD2 register (as of 2026-09-18) and the ESMA MiCA register (as of 2026-09-18). You can filter all of them by licence type, country, regulator and service on our European Fintech Index. (The CASP count keeps climbing as MiCA authorisations roll out — it was 279 on 2026-07-14 and 244 on 2026-06-26.)
Hover a country for details; select it to open the list.
Show as a table
| Country | Code | licensed firms | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK | GB | 733 | EMI 263 · PI 382 · AISP 88 |
| Germany | DE | 186 | EMI 13 · PI 82 · MiCA CASP 91 |
| France | FR | 165 | EMI 28 · PI 91 · MiCA CASP 35 · AISP 11 |
| Lithuania | LT | 159 | EMI 94 · PI 54 · MiCA CASP 6 · AISP 5 |
| Netherlands | NL | 152 | EMI 30 · PI 93 · MiCA CASP 29 |
| Malta | MT | 116 | EMI 43 · PI 50 · MiCA CASP 22 · AISP 1 |
| Spain | ES | 113 | EMI 12 · PI 79 · MiCA CASP 15 · AISP 7 |
| Sweden | SE | 103 | EMI 7 · PI 77 · MiCA CASP 1 · AISP 18 |
| Italy | IT | 88 | EMI 15 · PI 60 · MiCA CASP 9 · AISP 4 |
| Ireland | IE | 82 | EMI 30 · PI 33 · MiCA CASP 12 · AISP 7 |
| Poland | PL | 76 | EMI 1 · PI 59 · AISP 16 |
| Cyprus | CY | 76 | EMI 35 · PI 15 · MiCA CASP 25 · AISP 1 |
| Belgium | BE | 57 | EMI 7 · PI 40 · MiCA CASP 2 · AISP 8 |
| Denmark | DK | 55 | EMI 9 · PI 28 · MiCA CASP 7 · AISP 11 |
| Finland | FI | 55 | EMI 9 · PI 26 · MiCA CASP 5 · AISP 15 |
| Czechia | CZ | 54 | EMI 5 · PI 34 · MiCA CASP 12 · AISP 3 |
| Luxembourg | LU | 52 | EMI 18 · PI 21 · MiCA CASP 13 |
| Norway | NO | 49 | EMI 10 · PI 30 · MiCA CASP 6 · AISP 3 |
| Latvia | LV | 34 | EMI 12 · PI 12 · MiCA CASP 10 |
| Bulgaria | BG | 31 | EMI 13 · PI 13 · MiCA CASP 5 |
| Hungary | HU | 29 | EMI 4 · PI 16 · AISP 9 |
| Estonia | EE | 27 | EMI 3 · PI 20 · MiCA CASP 3 · AISP 1 |
| Croatia | HR | 26 | EMI 5 · PI 12 · MiCA CASP 6 · AISP 3 |
| Romania | RO | 21 | EMI 3 · PI 18 |
| Austria | AT | 21 | EMI 2 · PI 8 · MiCA CASP 11 |
| Liechtenstein | LI | 19 | EMI 6 · PI 1 · MiCA CASP 12 |
| Slovakia | SK | 19 | EMI 1 · PI 11 · MiCA CASP 6 · AISP 1 |
| Portugal | PT | 18 | EMI 2 · PI 14 · MiCA CASP 1 · AISP 1 |
| Greece | GR | 18 | EMI 4 · PI 13 · AISP 1 |
| Slovenia | SI | 12 | EMI 3 · PI 2 · MiCA CASP 4 · AISP 3 |
| Iceland | IS | 8 | EMI 4 · PI 3 · MiCA CASP 1 |
The index also covers the UK
We also merge the FCA Financial Services Register: 733 UK firms (263 authorised EMIs, 382 authorised payment institutions, 88 registered AISPs), taking the index to 2,654 licensed entities across the EEA and the UK. One number worth pausing on: the UK alone hosts 263 authorised EMIs — more than any single EEA state, including Lithuania (94). The catch is the post-Brexit asterisk: none of those licences passport into the EEA. A UK EMI serving European customers needs a second, EEA licence — which is exactly why so many UK fintechs in our catalogue (Paysafe, TrueLayer, PPRO, Currencies Direct…) show a second register entry in Ireland, Malta, Cyprus or Lithuania. The EEA analysis below refers to the 1,921 EEA entities in the 2026-09-18 snapshot.
Lithuania is Europe's e-money capital — by a landslide
Lithuania hosts 94 of the 428 EMIs — more than Germany (13) and France (28) combined, twice over. Counting all licence types, though, Lithuania has just lost the overall lead it held in our July snapshot: Germany (186 entities) now tops the table, ahead of France (165) and Lithuania (159). The swing is almost entirely MiCA — German CASP authorisations jumped from 57 to 91 in two months, while Lithuania's e-money base barely moved. Lithuania still does it with roughly 3% of the German and French populations combined. That is the visible result of the Bank of Lithuania's deliberate post-2016 licensing strategy — and it is why so many "German" or "French" fintech products actually run on Lithuanian IBANs and e-money licences.
Different licences cluster in different places
- Payment institutions follow big home markets: Netherlands (93), France (91), Germany (82), Spain (79), Sweden (77).
- E-money institutions follow licensing hubs: Lithuania (94), Malta (43), Cyprus (35), Ireland (30).
- MiCA CASPs cluster in Germany (91) — far ahead of France (35) and the Netherlands (29) — with Cyprus (25) and Malta (22) as the fast-growing offshore-style challengers.
The pattern matters for buyers: where your provider is licensed determines its supervisor, its passporting base and — often — the IBAN country code your customers will see (the "IBAN discrimination" problem).
The passporting illusion
The single market promises one licence for thirty EEA states. The register shows how selectively that promise is used: about 40% of all licensed entities (768 of 1,921) never passport beyond their home state. For payment institutions it is 46%. Only 686 entities (36%) passport into essentially the whole EEA (29+ states). E-money institutions are the most genuinely pan-European breed — 69% passport into ten or more states, which is exactly why EMIs are the workhorse licence of European fintech infrastructure.
Silicon Valley already holds European licences
A European licence is not the same thing as European sovereignty. The registers include Google (an Irish payment institution and a Lithuanian EMI), Amazon (Luxembourg EMI), Meta/Facebook (Irish EMI), Stripe (Irish EMI), Coinbase (Luxembourg MiCA CASP + EMI), plus Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Etsy and Booking — and PayPal operates through a full Luxembourg bank. All perfectly licensed; all ultimately governed by US parents subject to the US CLOUD Act.
That is why Fintechnologica never treats "EU-licensed" as the end of the analysis: origin, ownership/control and data residency are separate flags on every profile, shown next to the licence — so a buyer can see that a provider is EEA-supervised and who ultimately controls it.
Licensed is not the same as vetted
One honest caveat, straight from the source: ESMA itself notes its interim register "has no legal significance" — always confirm at the home regulator. And a licence tells you an entity may operate, not that it is a good infrastructure partner (the register still lists entities in liquidation, and history is full of licensed failures — Wirecard held licences too). That is the gap between the two tiers on Fintechnologica: 2,654 register-sourced entities (EEA + UK), of which 314 are cross-linked to hand-verified profiles with licence references, sovereignty analysis, ownership flags and risk notes. The register gives you breadth; verification gives you depth.
Sources
- EBA PSD2 register — payment institutions, e-money institutions and AISPs (bulk golden copy, as of 2026-09-18).
- ESMA interim MiCA register — crypto-asset service providers (as of 2026-09-18).
- FCA Financial Services Register — UK EMIs, PIs and RAISPs (as of 2026-09-18).
- Fintechnologica European Fintech Index — the rebuilt, filterable dataset behind every number in this analysis.
More insights
Europe's summer 2026 licence growth was almost all MiCA - and in Germany it was led by local cooperative banks, not crypto firms. How to read a register count.
A licence says a regulator authorised a company, not who controls it. European providers with foreign owners, and where that control concentrates.
Source-verified coverage of 21 IBAN country codes - the UK leads with 17, Lithuania 9; Poland, Austria and Portugal have zero dedicated issuers. Only 15 verified IBAN sponsors document SEPA Direct Debit, where IBAN discrimination actually bites.