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Can't help to notice that all of [european_country]'s first unicorns are payment service providers. Scalapay (it), Adyen (nl), now Payhawk. And probably a few
by LeonM 5y ago
Can't help to notice that all of [european_country]'s first unicorns are payment service providers.
Scalapay (it), Adyen (nl), now Payhawk. And probably a few more that I'm missing here.
- simiones 5y agoFor what it's worth, Romania's (UiPath) was not, they were a UI automation company. It doesn't detract from the pattern, but it does show it's not the only thing that has worked.
- gostsamo 5y agoFew years ago the EU adopted a manditory api standard for all of its banks. This, together with the lack of really big big banks and payment providers on the market, might've helped with opening the space to newcomers.
- Jommi 5y agoIt hasn't been fully adapted at all yet though.
- krageon 5y agoPayment services (if you wanted them to work) were for a long time predominantly US-based. I'm very happy this is changing.
- cleancoder0 5y agoCroatia's first unicorn was Infobip, one of the world's largest providers of A2P SMS services.
- Hanschri 5y agoKlarna (SE) is pretty big too.
- phphphphp 5y agoI’ll take a somewhat contrarian view to the other comments. There’s definitely a great deal of room for payment service providers outside the US so I don’t mean to discredit Payhawk’s success (I know nothing about them — they could be wonderful with a long life ahead) but Europe is going through somewhat of a FinTech bubble, a lot of these companies have very shaky futures when capital dries up. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of Stripe’s success, cryptocurrency induced finance obsession, the low barrier to entry… or a combination, but it’s a very frothy market here.
- ascar 5y agoI see a lot of local effort in FinTech and in Health/MedTech. I think it's because both markets usually have a massive amount of local (i.e. national) legislation and bureaucratic red tape, making international solutions less applicable than solutions from the local market. I actually expect to see the same happening with cloud services. Don't be surprised if Google, Amazon and Microsoft cloud services are driven out of the European market, because privacy laws make it illegal to host data on a Non-EU owned company (current rulings effectively already mean this, we are just short of really enforcing it. c.f. Schrems II).
- imtringued 5y agoWell, its impressive because London was supposed to monopolize this market.